When events in a fictional book become real

This is not exactly a book review, nor is it exactly my take on dreams, rather this is an exploration of the unusual vortex when the book you are reading starts to intersect with your life in ways that are beyond coincidence and for which there is no real language. In short, the book you are reading becomes a kind of dream, and the dream is reflecting your actual, lived life.

Let me go back to the year 1977.  I was a junior in high school, living in Portland Oregon, a year that was full of much adventure and many firsts.  Ever since I had taken my first bike-tour when I was thirteen years old, I wanted to take a longer, more substantial bike trip.  Somehow, I landed on the idea of riding my bike from Portland, Oregon to Missoula, Montana, along the Columbia Gorge, through Idaho, over the mountains and into the plains hosting Missoula.   Sometime before launching on this adventure, I bought a copy of a then ‘new’ and unheard of book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig.    If you’ve never read the book, you may consider this a spoiler alert.  Not only does the book grapple with huge intellectual issues of how western and eastern thought diverged, and the impact of this split on our western viewpoint of the world.  But the book is also a love story about a father -- plagued by mental illness, or at least a serious break down – and his son.   

As I started on the bike journey, I packed “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in my kit, and took off through the streets of Portland, over the Willamette bridge and onto the Columbia gorge.  As I rode east on my two wheeled bicycle, and headed toward Montana, the protagonist in the story, the father, head West on another two-wheeler, his motorcycle.   At some point in my bike journey, I started to recognize that the father’s route west was overlapping with my actual bike trip!!  Not only that, as a sixteen year who had just lived alone for the year away from my parents, issues of the father/son bond explored by Pirsig resonated a deep chord in me, and I was not much older than his son in the story.

Then yet another land mine exploded. The author explores the concept of ‘stuckness’ through a story of how he shears off a bolt while repairing his motorcycle and is left pondering how to remove a bolt that has no end to grasp with any tool.   And this is where fiction and my reality further collide. Two weeks before leaving on my bike trip, I, too, had sheared off a bolt and was caught in this exact grip of ‘stuckness.’  Though far from the zen- like analysis of the protagonist,  my shouts and screams and swearing belied an underdeveloped appreciation of ‘stuckness’, and instead of insight this experience had sent me into a deep rage.  Yet here it was – unmistakably – the fictional story I was reading was matching my life at the exact moment of reading, in a way that defied description.  I was on the road the author travelled (yet in the opposite direction) – perhaps a good metaphor for my life – and I had experienced what he was only using as a metaphor (twisting off a bolt and leaving nothing to hold onto) EXACTLY to the letter.   Suffice it to say, I loved the book, and indeed it has become one of the few books I’ve read four times in my life.  With each rereading, this paper treasure teaches a different lesson, consistent with my life stage.  Most memorably, when I became a father, my understanding of the love story with his son, took on a whole new meaning and urgency.  In short, this is a book that not only shaped my life but stood as an actual mirror to some of the events in my life, as much a map for living as it was a source of interesting ideas.

 Fast forward about 45 years, to my 59th year, the year I was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer.  About this time, I developed a deep and abiding love of trees, especially Redwood trees.  While I always loved Redwood trees, and would seek them out when they were nearby, after my diagnosis one of the most soothing and healing things became to sit in Redwood Groves.  Sometimes for hours.  I’m lucky that there is a campground only 35 minutes drive from my house that has some amazing old growth Redwoods, and at least once a season, I started driving to this park, setting up my camping chair, and simply sitting amidst the trees.   I started to notice that without trying, my resting heart rate drops over 10 to 20 beats a minute, my body slows, and the trees seem to be feeding me from the ground up, fortifying my body and spirit.  I started to feel and experience the connectedness of all the trees in the forest as if was all one organism and not a separate collection of individuals.   Indeed, the pull of these magical trees became so strong, that in September, my wife and I decided to take a camping trip up the northern California coast, stopping in Mendocino and then Humboldt, the site of some of the oldest old grove Redwoods in the world.

Right before leaving, we decided to select a book to read together, something that we’ve only done once before.  After some random searching, my wife revealed that she discovered a book “The Overstory’,  and all she knew about the book is that it has something to do with trees.   Book in tow, we loaded our car, and headed north.   It was while sitting in our campsite, near Avenue of the Giants, camped in a Redwood Grove that a strange tingling permeated my body.  We were only about 100 pages into the book, and one of the characters, starts talking about how he seeks out a professor who lives in a town called Fortuna.  That name had a vague familiarity, so I looked up the town and lo and behold it is less than 30 miles from where we are camping that very minute, and the school the author references shows up on my google search.  And then, another story emerges, where one of the characters starts a company named “sempervirens” the Latin name for Redwood trees.  And now, halfway into the book, all of the characters are starting to converge on some type of environmental mission which is all based on – you guessed it – saving old growth redwood trees.  And the place they are heading?  Yes!  Humboldt county,  only miles from the very campground we were sitting in while reading the book.

While I’m not yet done with the book and wouldn’t want to spoil the story in any case, this incredible book links together the life of trees, what they can teach humanity, and how we in our ignorance miss so much of what is right before our eyes – the miracle of trees.   Not only are the broader themes of the book exactly what I have been discovering through my cancer journey (i.e.  sitting in groves of trees for hours on end) but the very place my wife and I camped is at the heart of this fictional story that is being woven root by root between the humans and trees in the story.   Just like my bike trip to Montanan, and the words of Pirsig, now yet another author is not only speaking to my mind and heart, yet weaving events that are ACTUALLY taking place in my life as I read the book.

Now I’m not sure what this all means, other than that life is such a deep mystery, and that our language often lacks the specific words that describe this magic maybe because we are often too busy to observe it.  As someone who often interprets dreams – both mine, those of my wife and friends – what I’ve learned over the years is that when dreams are ‘quiet’ or we don’t remember our dreams, we can often look to our life for ‘dreams.’  I call these waking dreams.  Waking dreams are the things that are actually happening in our lives that are so odd or unusual that if we were to tell them in the third person they would sound like a dream.  I deeply believe that our outer and inner lives are connected in ways that we simply don’t comprehend.   Yet when the books you are reading start to reflect your actual, lived experience, or when life gets so ‘odd or strange’ that it seems dreamlike, I encourage you to stop and let in the magic of this intersection of these two worlds – waking and dreaming.    For me the resonance of “The Overstory” with my waking life is like life “winking’ at me, with a gentle breeze whispering “ you are on the right path, the tree healing is real.  Simply embrace it!!”    And so off I go this week to visit my Redwood Grove near Occidental, California, with a big smile.  “The Overstory” has become “My Story” and for this I am forever grateful.

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