Just before I awakened this morning, I had a particularly vivid dream. We were going somewhere in a car — my dad, my sisters, my aunt Martha and Uncle Bob. We went through a small New England seaside town; it was no more than a crossroads, really; then turned off the main road, and down a badly maintained road through abandoned farmland:– a stone wall on one side, rank field grass just starting to turn green again after winter. It was a gray April day, windy but warm enough that we only needed light jackets. We found ourselves on a flat promontory, long grass with puddles here and there, and at the edge dark granite bluffs dropped down into the heaving waves of the gray Atlantic.

There were quite a few other people around, and a few other cars. Dad and my sisters and aunt Martha went off somewhere in the car (to find a picnic site?). Uncle Bob and I walked around the field, picking our way through puddles, talking about something or other. We passed by some bushes, and there on the other side of the bushes was a little hollow, and half a dozen striking birds that I had never seen before except in field guides: gray birds waddling hurriedly away from us, with black heads and crests, and black mantle, the scapulars an iridescent green bordered top and bottom with black. Uncle Bob would keep talking, until I managed to draw his attention to the birds, and of course he knew exactly what they were. Off in the undergrowth I saw another bird I didn’t know, chicken-like, bold black and white pattern with some rusty touches on wings and head; but Uncle Bob didn’t see them, and I didn’t get a good look at them. The gray birds, though — I knew I could remember them well enough to identify them once I got my hands on a field guide, and I knew they would be a new bird for my life list.

Then I woke up.

Carol was talking on the phone somewhere. I went to the bathroom. The dream just wouldn’t go away. It was so convincing, so vivid, that I thought I must have seen those birds in a field guide somewhere, and managed to insert them into a dream. I went out into our sunny living room to get a couple of field guides — Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and the National Geographic Field Guide to North American Birds — and I leafed through them. The birds in my dream weren’t in either field guide. I thought, perhaps it was a Eurasian bird, one that I had seen in some European field guide. Slowly I realized that I was not going to find that bird in any field guide; except maybe in a field guide in my dreams, some other night when I am asleep.

I was vividly certain of the existence of these birds when I awoke. These birds do not exist in the world described by ornithology. In some sense, these two statements are equally “true” — in the sense that even though the birds weren’t real, they were an object of my consciousness:

For if we vary our factual world in free fantasy, carrying it over into random conceivable worlds, we are implicitly varying ourselves whose environment the world is: we each change ourselves into a possible subjectivity, whose environment would always have to be the world that was thought of, as a world of its [the subjectivity’s] possible experiences, possible theoretical evidences, possible practical life. [p. 28 of “Phenomenology” by Edmund Husserl, 1927]

As soon as I fully awakened, I gave up trying to find the dream birds in the waking-world field guides. But when I fall asleep tonight, my dreaming self won’t be surprised to find myself back on that rocky promontory next to the Atlantic Ocean, dream binoculars around my neck, dream-world field guides in hand, beating the bushes to find those gray and black dream birds with the iridescent green stripe running down their sides. And this time I will positively identify them.