I'm in Santa Cruz, biking east across the University of California campus. Halfway, by the bookstore, the road suddenly dead-ends; it's been turned into a parking lot with tire-slashers and ropes and guards. I walk in, past several people at the entrance; head to a far corner and squeeze through a narrow gate, tangling some ropes as I do; straighten them guiltily. Beyond, I can bike again; I coast fast down a hill toward a pond by Stevenson College.

All the while, I'm wearing only a T-shirt, a brown sock, a blue sock, and a fuzzy hat. I don't feel indecently exposed. The gate watchers did notice me, as I barged through them, but I attribute that to my mismatched socks and silly hat, not being half-naked.

So I coast down the hill wondering why I feel a bit odd... and then realize my cap covers my eyes! I'm blind! Think I'm gliding along the lakeshore; raise my cap to peek. Wrong! I'm sliding through... bedsheets.

My friend Dave Self is watching me across the dorm room. I hear the wind, my haunter, faint in my ears. "You hear that?" I ask him.

"Hear what?"

I turn into the wind and shout. "You're my critic and torturer. You mock all my actions and make me feel hollow. But I'll go on doing what I choose--I defy you!"

The wind-voice rises to a roar, a hollow voice like a movie blizzard, and the curtains, papers, sheets all flutter in the stiff wind in the room. And still Dave sits wondering, as I yell at the wind "Stop this! Leave me alone!"

Sudden silence. The room stills, the papers settle. The wind is gone.

I ask Dave what he felt and heard; he says "Only you yelling defiance; no wind."

I feel sorry that Dave couldn't hear or feel it, but don't doubt for a moment the wind was real. Papers blown all over...

DREAM NOTES

• Wind blows papers around but Dave Self hears nothing: my "Day Self" can't hear the savage self-criticism that's paralyzing me?
• ACTION: I need to identify these inner critics, even if my everyday persona denies the problem. It's real.

And I wake up again. She was a dream too. I muse "She came all the way here just to tell me this; I must honor this judgment and obey it."

Then I wake up AGAIN. That thought, too, was part of the dream.

NOTE FORTY YEARS LATER

For good or ill, I DID soon leave college; I didn't return to finish my degree for thirty years--years of dreamwork, bodywork and therapy that slowly stilled the relentess wind of self-putdowns I'd been taught.

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