It’s been decades since the dream. I remember it as if it were last night. I was awake, and knew I was “away,” not in my body. Do you call that lucid dreaming? When you know you are asleep in your bed and also awake in this new place? I can’t pretend to understand it when it happens.

But there I was on a hillside looking over a pond, huge old barn on the opposite hill, old white farmhouse behind me. There were a group of us strangers. Somewhere in the Eastern U.S. we had gathered for a writer’s workshop. So early in the morning, and crisply cool this fall day. My head hurt and I was craving coffee.

Patiently we waited our turn to be ferried across the pond in one of two rowboats being piloted by a couple of young men. Students at the nearby college perhaps. The day’s activities would take place in the barn. I was hoping I’d dressed warm enough. Finally, it was just myself and a slightly older woman standing to my left. We approached the boat as it pulled alongside the small platform. Once seated she introduced herself, offering a handshake. “May Sarton.”

As the day went on I would come to find that she was one of the two instructors of the workshop. At some point in time I had the thought, “don’t forget her name when you wake up.” And so without coming fully awake, I reached over to my nightstand and clumsily scribbled m A Y s a R to N and went right back into the dream.

I didn’t remember the dream at all in the morning until I saw the paper. I could barely read what I’d jotted down in the dark. Years before the internet or cell phones, I would have to go the library to research and try to find out if she were actually a real person. Did she exist? If so, was she a writer?

The thing that astonishes me now, remembering the dream, is that I had that experience and still did not realize that I am a writer. I’m only just realizing that, here, today…I wonder if I’ll ever truly believe it.