A warm lake. I swim way out--gotta fight my trained fear about swimming out too deep. I'm heading for a business meeting on the water, on an old wooden boat. Reach it ahead of time, so I even swim past it, around it, exploring. The water's not crystal-clear (as it should be) but clean enough to see quite a ways; can map the bottom.

The boat-meeting itself is kind of a joke, though. Trivial. But tourists come to see the famous underwater features of the lake, so I need to learn its contours, mentally map the hidden terrain...

• Joke-meeting out in lake: Monty Python skit of a discussion held far out in water off beach. Why push it so much farther out though, and to a boat?
• The boat-meeting itself is trivial, cartography's what counts: learning deeper aspects of dreamwork?

NEXT DAY

Biking to work at the Stanford Library, I pass, parked on the street in this landlocked town, for the only time in the years I've lived here, an old wooden boat! The boat from my dream.

So I'd better revise my interpretation. The boat itself--this particular psychic hit--IS trivial; what matters is mapping the bathymetry of the whole murky lake, i.e. learning this hazy yet effective sixth sense.

Note how this dream exhibiting apparent ESP contains what may be a metaphor of ESP: peering through murky water to learn hidden matters. That is, the dream seems to be itself aware it's groping around for an ESP hit! I call this odd sort of meta-dream self-flagging.

Self-flagging need not be exotic; a dream can flag itself literal (perhaps a character tells you not to interpret it symbolically) or lucid (characters discuss lucid dreams, prompting you to go lucid), or about your past, present or future (by setting the scene there).

I'm not saying such dreams are common; but I have some. Are you sure you don't? You won't know if you never look.

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