The recurring lake I have visited seventeen times in sleep

The lake is always the same lake. I know this with the certainty that only dreams provide — a certainty that evaporates on waking, leaving only its outline.

The water is dark, not from depth but from something in its surface, as though it is reflecting a sky I cannot see. There is a far shore. I have never reached it. Between visits I forget the lake entirely, and then I am back, standing at the same edge, in the same stillness, with the same sense that I have interrupted something.

On the geography of sleep

I have read enough to know that recurring dream locations are common — that the sleeping mind builds and returns to its own architecture with the same conservatism it applies to the waking world. Libraries, houses, stations. The mind, it seems, likes a sense of place.

What I find harder to explain is the specific quality of recognition. It is not like remembering a house you grew up in. It is more like arriving somewhere you always knew existed but had never managed to find.

The seventeenth visit

Last month the lake was different. The far shore was closer. Or perhaps I was. I stood in the water up to my knees — cold, with a weight to it — and looked across at something I could not resolve into a shape.

I woke before I could see it clearly. This is always the way.

I have started keeping this journal partly in the hope that writing about the lake will change it. Either it will finally let me cross, or it will stop appearing. Either outcome seems acceptable. Both seem equally unlikely.