To Tirza

I dreamt that I was going up a narrow street in a wheeled office chair, sitting in the chair and pushing myself along with my feet. It felt like I was going up the long (quarter-mile) driveway at my old home near Kirtland, Ohio, and that I was going to turn right on Brockway Road to go to Hell Hollow Wilderness Area (of which that old home is now a part, my parents having sold it to the county). It felt like that in terms of muscle memory, but the scenery was that of rural Taiwan, with a few single-story houses with white stucco walls and terracotta roofing.

I passed a young woman in a tube top who was out walking her dog, and I took this as a sign that I was on the right road. Someone had used her as a landmark in giving directions: "You'll see a girl in a tube top walking her dog and then another girl eating a piece of cheese." I didn't see this second girl, but I had a mental image of someone taking a single slice of American cheese out of its plastic sleeve, folding it in half, and eating it. I wondered why people ate stuff like that.

When I got to the somewhat larger road (corresponding to Brockway) and turned right, I tried turning my desk chair around and sitting in it backwards, thinking that having the chair back in front of me rather than behind me would make it feel more like riding a motorcycle and thus more normal. I quickly found that the chair wasn't very well balanced in this orientation, though, so I turned it back the other way.

Later, no longer in the swivel chair but on foot, I was in a forest that again corresponded to Hell Hollow but looked more Taiwanese in terms of the flora. Some young people (not clearly defined) were there, and I asked, "Excuse me, where's Tirza?"

"Ken's sister" was the reply. I thought of a student of mine called Ken who has two big sisters, also my students, called Anna and Jenna. I wasn't sure if Tirza was the name of Ken's sister or the place where she lived. The Tirza I was looking for was a place.

"I mean I want to go to Tirza," I clarified.

"It's a lake," they said.

"I know," I said. I had a mental image of a familiar scene from past dreams: the rocky coastline at which I would go whale-watching from the shore. That was where I wanted to go. "How do I get there?"

"Just follow the river north." This river was quite narrow, scarcely meriting the name, and corresponded to Paine Creek. (Yes, Paine Creek runs through Hell Hollow. Sounds like a lovely place, doesn't it? It's beautiful.) Paine Creek flows into the Grand River and then into Lake Erie in the north, so I guess Tirza corresponds to Erie.

"Should I follow the east side of the river or the west side?"

"The east side. The west side is closed, or you can't really get to the west side from here."

So I started hiking north, with the river to my left. I couldn't see the river through the trees, but I knew it was there. I was now accompanied by a young woman. Back in the summer of 2004, I had been hiking alone in Hell Hollow and had fallen in with a strange otherworldly girl called Désirée, whom I had never met before or since, and we had hiked together for a few hours, looking for some hidden tunnels she said could be found somewhere in the shale cliffs and which were rumored to be paranormal "portals" of some kind. She had offered me marijuana for the first time but, still being extremely Mormon in terms of my code of conduct despite several years of atheism, I had turned it down. This girl in the dream, though Taiwanese, corresponded to Désirée.

We were following a wooden walkway but weren't on it. Rather, to the right of the walkway was something like a long balance beam that was somehow suspended from above. I decided to get down from the balance beam and use the walkway, but when I did so, the beam, without my weight on it, rose a couple of feet higher, so that it was about level with my head. I was worried that the girl, still on the beam, would now find it difficult to get down, but she said not to worry about it. A few minutes later she, too, jumped down and followed me on the walkway.

"Look at that," I said, pointing off to the right. The walls of some ancient stone building were just visible through the trees. A large eye, somewhat like an Egyptian wedjat-eye but simpler and more symmetrical, was painted in black on the side of the wall. Looking at the wall, I could see that three such eyes were visible, at intervals of about 20 feet.

"What does that one-eye symbol mean?" I asked. "Or I guess it's three eyes."

Before she could answer, I woke up, with the Tori Amos song "Bliss" in my head.

Shortly after waking, I had a sentence pop into my head: "The cedars are hewn down, but we will build with sycamores." This is an inversion of a line from Isaiah, attributed to "the people of Samaria":

The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars (Isa. 9:10).

In the Bible, the city of Tirzah was for a time the capital of Samaria, from which some of the kings of the Northern Kingdom reigned. Given the juxtaposition with Tori Amos, I connected the sycomore reference with Amos, "a gatherer of sycomore fruit" (Amos 7:14), the first of what Walter Kaufmann punningly dubbed the "Amosaic" (as opposed to Mosaic) prophets. Moses and Elijah, I thought, were the cedars; the literary prophets who succeeded them, the sycomores.

I have a lot of thoughts on this dream but don't have time to type them out now. I want to get the dream itself published first.