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Most writers are aware of the various clichés, failures, and rolled-eyed responses that come with transcribing and/or translating dreams in/to one’s work. But still: For the past few years, I’ve diligently recorded my dreams, first on my phone’s notes app and then (aided by the big brained-addition of a light-up pen) a notepad in my nightstand drawer.

Most of the time, I keep my dreams to myself.*

This past Saturday-into-Sunday, I dreamed about my dog. And in an effort to preserve the amber glow of this particular artifact, I’m writing about it here.

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The redwoods are sinking. No; the water is rising. Waves lap at the bases of tall evergreens that stand in isolated clusters. No forest, just trees, and an ocean coming in like a sigh.

I watch the incoming flood from the safety of a makeshift beach.** Patio wood, not sand, beneath my feet. I’m not alone, but for a certain kind of person, you’re always alone when you face the water. The people around me also notice the waves, but they aren’t scared so I’m not either. Until I notice the dogs in the near distance.

They’re playing. At first I’m worried that my dog Sage is playing bad—she’s one of those dogs who loves ball more than anything else (including, sometimes, I worry, me)—but I realize with a start that ball is the least of my worries. Because the field in which the dogs are playing is rapidly filling up with water, and in the fluid tempo of dream-time, all those dogs, Sage included, are suddenly splashing, then swimming, in water that now reaches up to my waist.

Wait, I think to myself, then say, Wait. I walk out into the water, calling, Sage, Sage!

I’m not the only person who leaves shore to find their dog, but soon I’m alone in the waves, which now splash up to my shoulders, and then my feet lose the ground. I can’t turn back though, not until I find her, the soft black triangles of her ears, one pointed and one floppily folded, the dog-eared archetype, but I can only see the triangle tops of submerged trees. I look back for the beach and I see it, the glimmer of structures that remain above the waves, but the current pulls me farther and farther out.

If I’m this far out, then Sage must be even farther out. I keep calling for her and my stomach drops because, she must be so scared, swept up in the rolling waves, so confused, and I remember that time at the lake when Colin jumped in and Sage jumped in after him, following his lead or perhaps thinking she had to rescue him, who can say, she’s brave in inscrutable ways, growling at shadows in the dark but jumping when the trash trucks screech in the street on Friday mornings. She can swim, but exhaustion catches up with her earlier these days, her eyes still ecstatic and alert even as her panting makes her body pulse in visible heaves, like waves, like the steady working of bellows on embers, hot sharp breaths marking a metronome beat that will one day, for her, for me, for all things, stop ticking.

I can’t fight the current. The pull of the water is too strong, like that time in the Yuba when I couldn’t figure out how to go with the flow and kept crashing into the smooth boulders that guard miniature set of rapids, which cascade down the river in abbreviated falls. The impact against the rocks isn’t hard, that wasn’t exactly the danger, but if you got stuck against them, you had nothing to cling to, fingers scrabbling against slippery stone. At one point, the water wanted to flow under instead of past and I had the thought, This is it, gasping for staccato breaths as the water pushed me briefly up before pulling me down again, and it was only when Nick used his body as a float, his legs supporting my back, giving me just enough buoyant lift to kick off from the rocks, that I could break from the current and make it to the next section of falls.

There are no rocks here. Just water and the thought of my dog alone in the waves, having the same thoughts in her own language, which she speaks without ever being fully understood by me, no matter how hard I try.

Then I see them: a set of silver poles, just out of reach until the current swerves into a wide bend. I reach out toward the poles as the current carries me past. My hands grab onto the metal and my body stretches out like a flag.

The dream folds into itself. I’m rescued; I’m back at the beach where I started, in a building filled with other people, some of whom were also rescued. But none of us are happy, because all of the dogs are gone.

A search party is dispatched. From a narrow doorway, I watch trees and eventually horizon reemerge as the flood recedes.

I don’t know how we get the news, but as suddenly as the water had appeared, whispers on the wind:

They’re coming home. Yes, they’re coming home.

The first dog that returns is a shepherd mix, like Sage, and my heart leaps before I realize no, it’s larger, more brown in its coat. But it’s a miracle, and it walks into the room, searching for its people as the atmosphere in the room transforms from quiet ruin into incredulous hope.

More dogs return. One dog, someone notes, seems to have come from a town thirty miles away. I try not to think about that distance as I wait for her. Too big, too small, not the right color, not the right type.

Until, there she is.

Black coat, cocked tail, 1.5 ears, brown paws. Big brown eyes that she fixes on me. She trots over, dripping water, and I throw my arms around her, and it’s not really her that I hold. It’s Sage as a puppy, maybe a year old, a third of the size she is now. She’s small enough that I can carry her against my chest, and I do, I carry her, out of the building and through the trees that aren’t quite a forest, into more buildings whose purposes were unknown in the dream and don’t matter now. What mattered, what matters, was her cold wet fur against my warm body, activating every memory of every time I felt her heart thumping in her big barrel chest; her red-brown eyes in late afternoon sun; the steady clicking of her nails against the sidewalk on the final stretch of our afternoon walks, when she’s just focused on getting home, and I hum “These Days” by Nico to myself and walk to its beat, watching her floppy ear flap in time with her gait, and I think to myself, How lucky, how lucky, how lucky.

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*My short story “Revel Nation,” published through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop back in 2022, is based on the same dream that became the foundation of my second novel The L.O.V.E. Club. On that note, TLC has been out for about two months now. Time doesn’t fly; it bends.

**Zadie Smith, “Find Your Beach”

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♬ xoxo Lio

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