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Under obligations to my creditors, I was required to spend my first two years in practice dreaming exclusively for the unfortunate Mr. C, an eminent member of the bar who needed to escape from the paralysis of his existence. He wrote out the objectives for each dream and measured the results against these objectives, offering what he felt were constructive suggestions to a novice when I failed to produce according to plan. No doubt he saw himself as my benefactor and guide. "Dreams," he was wont to say in his grand manner, "are the life that informs the soul." I don't know if this is true or not, but I regret spending some of my most creative years laboring at such drudgery and wonder even now if my association with Mr. C did not in some way inhibit the development of my natural powers.

When at last I was on my own, I started with such simple, commonplace dreams that it pains me now to recall them. For a new bride, I dreamt of endless corridors in a dark house and amorphous figures of authority. For a heart patient, I dreamt of blackbirds fluttering in a hollow chest. Some of the same dreams occurred night after night until dreaming them became a task rather than a pleasure. To break the monotony of these repetitions, I would sometimes dream for myself. And when I had the chance, I would dream of flying. There was nothing like it. I climbed the air as if pedaling a bicycle, pushing down hard with each step, but faltering at times as the ether gave way beneath me. Once aloft, I propelled myself with nothing more than an impulse of the will, felt throughout my body. Among trees and rooftops I floated until I forgot that I was flying and had to summon my will again to keep from falling. Of course I never informed my clients that these were my own dreams and, as far as I know, they were content with the illusion.

It is commonly believed that dreamers need no company, that they are so consumed by their dreaming they have no time for anything else. But nothing could be farther from the truth. After spending their nights dreaming the dreams of businessmen who would rather be fishing or politicians who want to be loved, dreamers need the companionship of a person who can support and comfort them, someone who can help them forget the anxieties and frustrations of troubled souls. And so, once secure in my profession, with a list of regular clients, I decided to marry. I chose a woman who did not dream. Isn't that always the case? She had no need, she said. But that wasn't the problem. No, I could have lived with that. The problem was that her hopes had yet to break upon the rocks of middle age. Care, want, and grief were as foreign to her as dreaming. Her optimism was too much to bear. After coming home from a night of dreaming the dreams of the disenchanted, I needed to be with someone who could understand and appreciate my work. All she could do was encourage me blindly. So, in short, I failed to make merry in the springtime summons of my blood.

To salvage the situation, she suggested we move to a place where the dirt is red and the trees provide no shade. Not the antipodes, mind you, but somewhere on the verge. "A new life together," she said. "It would do you good." She finally left when I told her I couldn't live without my dreams. That was her right. We had never had any kind of commitment. Apart from the formalities of marriage. She gave me the ultimatum on a Thursday. It was a holiday. Or my birthday. Or both. I've never really been satisfied by my grasp of time.

"It's me or them," she said.

"Them?" I said.

"You'll have to choose."

I bade her good-bye. But she was already gone. South. Or west. Is there a difference? She went somewhere where the sun is hot and the days are long. That's all I know.

Her eyes were blue, like the sky you see through clouds after a rain. Since then I have lived alone. No cats. No dogs. No children. Sine prole. Sometimes, I confess, I feel the desire for love late in the afternoon. Sometimes I feel it in the morning. But most of the time I don't feel it at all. I think of other things. That's just the way I am. And then I am comforted by a reverie that I keep to myself. Of a luminous morning hidden in the heart of an old fable. The morning of all mornings. When the spirit moved across the waters.

For several months after her departure, I had trouble sleeping. And as a consequence, I could not work. At night I went for walks along the river and felt an intimacy with the stars I had never known before. I watched the moon rise and fall through its phases and the planets in their wandering. In the meantime, I lost many of my clients. But what I discovered was worth the loss. Beneath the stars and moon, I came to know the mysteries of the night, the empty calm of the infinite, the wonder of the ancients. Not in ways I could express with words, no, but in ways that I could dream. And soon I was able to sleep again.

Then everything began to change. Not just dreaming, but the world around me. And not all at once, but gradually. I assumed it was the natural progression of things. Colors lost their luster. Fruits lost their savor. Landscapes lost the sanctity of the sublime. Perhaps worst of all, the coral houses of my youth were painted gray and white. Life had become comfortable and uniform. People found satisfaction for their desires, solutions to their problems, in simple objects acquired for the sake of acquisition. They were so enamored with the traders and mountebanks who descended on the public squares that they forgot the value of dreaming. They forgot that love begins in dreams, that great undertakings and even minor decisions are first cast in the colors of dreams.

I did my best to adapt. But the state of my clients did not encourage me. Coming and going in a shadow play of purpose, they requested my services from a shallow serenity, an indecent security. When church let out on Sundays, these good citizens flew like startled swallows from their sanctuaries of brick and mortar, tossed into the face of the sun, torn by the gravities of time. They came to me like the living dead, expecting me to make a difference, expecting me to rouse their souls. As if I had the power of the winds that stir in the night. They came to me, these upstanding citizens, sleepy after their evening meals, wearing their clay with pride, forgetting the indifference of their bones. Night after night I touched their souls in a sea of lost desire. I tried my best to help them. I did what I could. I swam for daylight to save us, but there were stars at noon, and the water shimmered like a lover caught forever in the throes of pleasure. I woke covered with salt and knew my days as a dreamer were numbered.

One by one, I bade them good-bye. The printer, the baker, the soldier. If I could have dreamt of words and flour and war, things might have been different. But I had come to accept the inevitable. Out of a sense of obligation, perhaps habit, I continued to visit the priest. Unlike the others, he had a constitutional attachment to melancholy and this intrigued me. Yet the night eventually arrived when I had to let him go as well. We ate a quiet meal together and then I retired to a room on the upper floor of the rectory. There was a gable and a small window where I could see the light in the west and its reflection on the river. A single star gleamed above the hills. In his dream, he walked through the darkened streets of his childhood with a young woman. They lay on their backs in a fragrant garden and looked at the constellations overhead, which were surrounded by haloes of silver light. Then the woman disappeared and the priest found the head of an angel in a field of barley and, farther along, a wing that had been severed from its shoulder. The silken feathers were as smooth as the caches of a woman's body, but the wing was heavy with the burdens of its holy office. The next morning larks were singing and the river was hidden beneath a layer of fog. I left without taking his money. When I arrived home, I sat down and wrote a public notice for the local paper informing all interested parties that I was no longer available for the purpose of dreaming.

Part 2 will appear in the next issue of The Charles River Journal.