In lyrical and graceful prose, she explores the many ways of experiencing a dream. You can tell it to yourself, or someone else. You can look for a story with a beginning, middle, and end. You can turn images into a poem or a song. You can dance it, sculpt it, act it out. You can doodle it, draw it, paint it, in pencil, pen, watercolor, more. You can jot segments on colored papers, cut or tear them into different shapes, and make a collage.

Any and all of these approaches, and others that may come to mind, Mellick suggests, may open new possibilities in our waking lives. The dream journey even may be sufficient in itself, a mental afternoon at a sidewalk café.

She cites an astonishing variety of dream theories: dreams don't exist. They are meaningless productions of the brain. They mean the opposite of what they say. They are about the past, or the future. They are ordinary, or sacred. They are symbolic, or purely imagistic. Take your choice, she suggests, but know that no theory has been or can be shown to be absolute truth.

This is a liberating view that provides many lenses through which to view dreams. No interpretation, she emphasizes, is inherently right or wrong. Dreamers may find it useful to entertain several contradictory ideas simultaneously. That's particularly helpful when bad dreams occur.

These are easy to push away. "We turn our own images into scapegoats," she writes, "boo them out of town, lock them up in forgetfulness, or run fleeing from them into the safe haven of waking reality and ordinariness." But dream events, she maintains, are neither bad nor good.