The Dream
A dream came last night, which I remembered fully this morning—unusual in itself. And it took place in my back yard, though it was both the yard I inhabit now and the yard of my childhood, merged into one, as dreams are apt to do.
There, an artful arrangement awaited discovery. Tree stumps, limbs, and trunks lay piled upon one another in an interlocking manner that spoke of intention, as if some unseen curator had composed a sculpture from what time and weather had left behind.
When I reached out to touch them, my hands found surprise. These weathered forms, which should have been heavy with the density of wood and years, had been hollowed by time itself. They were rotted through, yet not with decay’s dampness—they were light and dry, transformed into airy vessels rather than solid mass.
Somehow, as dreams permit impossible physics, I found myself propping up a trunk that had been cleft cleanly along its length. It towered above my home, this great hollow half-cylinder, and I leaned it against another tree for support. Yet it was the interior that commanded wonder—not the familiar barked exterior, but the cavernous architecture time had carved within.
The hollow space revealed itself as a cathedral of wood. Veins ran through its walls like ancient rivers frozen in timber. Hollows and chambers formed a geography of absence, more substantial in its emptiness than solidity ever was. Feathery light filtered through, revealing a multitude of dark wooden colors that dazzled the eye—chestnut depths giving way to amber chambers, shadows playing across surfaces smoothed by seasons of patient transformation.
Then came the wind. A sudden gust lifted this towering trunk—this thing that should have weighed hundreds of pounds—and set it sailing. It rose effortlessly over my home, over the neighboring trees, floating like a great wooden vessel through the air. I watched in wonder as it drifted beyond my private yard into the public realm, finally coming to rest in the street where others might behold it: a hollowed vessel that had learned to fly.
Reflection
When I woke, with the image of the trunk carried aloft by wind still vivid and present, I immediately, before any conscious analysis, found myself recalling a verse from Sirach 34:1:
“Vain and deceptive hopes are for the foolish, and dreams lend wings to fools.”
Strange that this verse should surface decades after its first encounter, yet perhaps not strange at all. Since my undergraduate days, I have described my own words as but the “ramblings of a fool.” Yet here was a dream that seemed to insist on meaning, demanding that this particular fool pay attention to what had taken wing.
And so its meaning began to unfold.
What does it mean to be made light by emptiness? In this dream, the trunk had surrendered its solid density to time’s patient carving, and in return had been granted the gift of flight. It was not diminished by its hollowness but transformed by it—its beauty now living in the spaces where wood once was, in the architecture of absence that created room for light to play.
Perhaps this speaks to a deeper truth about how we ourselves are shaped. The experiences that hollow us out—loss, time, the gradual weathering that comes with living—may not be diminishing us but preparing us for a different kind of beauty. What we think of as erosion might actually be revelation, uncovering inner landscapes we never knew existed.
The dream suggests that lightness is not about adding something but about discovering what remains when the unnecessary weight has been worn away. Those veins and chambers within the wood were always there, waiting to be revealed. The capacity for flight was present all along, hidden beneath layers that time knew how to remove.
And there is something profound about how the dream moves from private discovery to public gift. What begins in the intimate space of a backyard—this personal encounter with transformed wood—ultimately takes wing and lands where others might find it. The wind carries our revelations beyond the boundaries we set for them, beyond the fences of our private understanding.
The hollow trunk that sails over houses and trees reminds us that what we think is fixed and earthbound may be preparing for flight. What appears to be ending—the tree’s death, the wood’s decay—may actually be a becoming, a transformation into something lighter, more beautiful, more free.
In the end, perhaps the dream asks me to consider: What in my own life is being hollowed by time? What losses carve space for unexpected beauty? And what within is growing light enough to catch the wind? Sirach warns that dreams lend wings to fools. Yet perhaps even folly bears wisdom, if its wings lift what was thought earthbound into flight.
