The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous. Think of your nightly dreams, how smoothly one scene slides into another, how you don’t roll your closed eyes and say, "Wait just a minute—I’ve never shot drugs with Rosalyn Carter, and I don’t even own any horses, let alone little Arabians the size of cats." You mostly go along from scene to scene simply because it’s all so immediate and compelling. You simply have to find out what happens next, and this is how you want your reader to feel.

In this world, my mother can weave back together her grandparents’ dreams that unraveled in Turkey. She won’t work in factories like they did. She will write and paint. She will sing the lyrics of her grandparents’ songs to music of her own invention. She will teach her daughters to sing too. She will show them that anything is possible. Perhaps dreams can be passed from mother to child through blood, or through whispering to womb, or through the sheer power of faith that can cross oceans and mountains and estrangements, because my mother’s dreams have always been my dreams: to create beauty from ink and thin air.

In this world, my father can carry his father’s dashed hopes of an academic life across continents. In his late forties, my grandfather got the university degree colonization had denied him. He studied literature. My father got a PhD in his twenties. He dreamed he would return home with his knowledge and use it to help build the Africa the generation before him had fought so long and hard for. As a child, I watched him do this. As an adult, I believe it might have killed him—the heartbreak from all of the suffering he could not end. Yet his dream, like my mother’s, was in me too.

I keep the focus on the dream images and point out when the response is too symbolic and explanatory. I ask for reflections, not interpretations. The conversation is not headed for a conclusion but always hovers over the dream. Whether individually or in a group the essential thing is to stop using your hyperactive intelligence to pin the dream down. You have to be receptive, wait for the dream to show you its meaning, put some reins on that demanding intellectual ego of yours. Be more relaxed. Let the dream give you thoughts. Don’t force it into the open. It’s a special skill to allow thoughts to arise into awareness instead of forcing them through mental exertion.

But willfully ignoring what is true is not the same as dreaming. It’s delusion; and delusion leads to terrible decisions and, even worse, the destruction of trust.

Writers are the dream mechanisms of the human race. Narrative affects us the ways dreams affect us. They share the same insubstantiality. They both have the hidden capacity to alter reality. Dreams may be freer because they are not composed of words, but when narrative fiction has entered us, it no longer exists as words either.