Standing in front of the stove, stirring the chopped chinese cabbages and carrots and garlic and ginger in the biggest frying pan, I think to myself: Oh I remember that place where I…. But it was a dream, not a memory: a dream place in which I wandered sometime last night while lying in bed.

Books make dreams even stronger in summertime:

A hymn to Agni, god and priest of fire, that I read in the Rig Veda comes back as people in a mysterious place that is part building and part woods.

The story about a library with no end becomes a waking dream, a poem that makes me interrupt cooking in order to write it down.

Perry Mason the amazing attorney is in my dreams, or is it his secretary Della Street, or I am detective Paul Drake.

The dreams fade into the early morning light that I never see because I stay up late into the night reading.

The dreams return at the oddest moments, a flash, then they fade. Sometimes I have to put down a book because of such a strong thought, which I think I should write down, but then I don’t, and when I next think of it, it’s gone; or was it only a dream thought that I thought I had thought?

Summer is rooted in the earthy carrots, grounded in the solid chinese cabbage that we bought at the farmer’s market in Davis Square. But summer fades into the nothingness of airy dusk when dreams return to you as you sit nodding there on the front porch reading.