Through five steps—thinking of what you want to ask the dream, formulating the question, preparing for the Dream Night, recording the dream, and analyzing and working with the dream—you can easily build and nurture a relationship with your dreams. And as a result, you can turn your waking life into a dream life.

~ Machiel Klerk

I wake ready to start a new poem. Before my walk, over coffee, I let it begin. Inspired by Suzi. I get a very primal draft down, and then Charlie and I go out into the heating morning, up the dirt road through the walls of knats. A fine breeze is blowing on the beach, whipping up white caps. My toe is better! It’s purple, but it’s letting me walk normally across the rocks. I am mindful and careful of all slipperiness. My creative energy is flowing and I find many pictures today that make me feel happy. I’m so grateful to have my creative zest. I listen to a podcast, This Jungian Life, to a fascinating interview with Machiel Klerk on his new book, “Dream Guidance: Connecting to the Soul through Dream Incubation.” And this stirs my creative juices even more. I swim at Great Rock Bight, and Charlie swims for the stick before we head home. I get the draft of a poem for the first time in a few weeks. Then, Frank arrives, and we have the whole afternoon and evening for play. Charlie gets to come too. We go to the island of Chappaquidick. Somehow, we’ve been coming to Martha’s Vineyard for thirty years and we haven’t taken the three-minute ferry across. Today we do. And we explore the island beaches all day to our heart’s content, the wild beauty, the marshes, the ocean, the shorebirds. Exquisite relaxing happiness in the warm waves. A quiet dinner at home, the two of us. And a drive into sunset, up Island, to Aquinnah, the cliffs, the lighthouse. The sweetness of being together all day, being, not doing. I think about mothering. All its phases and stages. And the one I’m in now, which includes grandmothering. And what I most want to give now. On the drive home from Chappaquidick Frank and I listen to another of the This Jungian Life podcasts about: The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, by: Connie Zweig, So many thoughts churning, in a good way.