Making Space to Find the Meaning
by Brooke Warner
Last night in our Show Up & Write accountability group at Memoir Nation, I shared that I had a dream this week that’s staying with me, that’s lingering.
In the dream, I’m walking the grounds of The Butchart Gardens and nothing’s there. It’s not particularly tragic, but rather striking—that nothing is there where before there’d been something so splendid. I told the group how I’d been to the Gardens with my dad (and his partner and my brother) when I was a little girl, about ten years old. The vividness of the experience of going there has always struck me. Maybe I just had a really good day. Maybe I was moved by the vastness of this extraordinary sanctuary. Maybe I was just so happy to be there with my dad, who at forty years old would have been in the prime of his life, taking in the day with his family. Whatever the reason, the memory of the Gardens has always been bright.
In August, my wife wanted to take me to Vancouver, a birthday gift, and I asked if we could go to The Butchart Gardens—and we did. My dad died in May 2023, and I wanted to see the place again; wanted to explore this place that loomed in my memory. It had been thirty-nine years.
The visit was lovely, and the place looks the same. It’s a marvel, really, and I can see why my ten-year-old self was so taken with it. And, that was it. We boarded the ferry back to Vancouver and I hadn’t thought about it since. Until my dream a few nights ago.
Last night I asked the writers in the group to explore a dream that has lingered in their memory. Describe it in vivid sensory detail first, the prompt offered, as if you are back inside it. Then follow the thread: Why this dream? What does it want you to pay attention to?
Before last night, I thought my dream signified death, a logical interpretation. Here were the Gardens, such a core memory of an early trip with my dad that I have stored as a clearly happy memory. In the dream, all is desolate, but I’m not alone. I’m walking through the space with someone I love and trust, though I’m not sure who.
Last night as I wrote, I made a connection. This past week, I’ve been reading Susan Orlean’s Joyride: A Memoir, in preparation to interview her on Thursday night in Oakland, CA. In the memoir, she writes about writing her previous book, The Library Book, and how she discovered a Senegalese saying for when someone dies; they say his or her library has burned.
In my dream, I walked through the burned-out terrain of what was once The Butchart Gardens observing this nothingness. What had been was no longer there. I wrote these words: My dad’s library burned. And yet, there was the absence of sadness for the person walking with me, letting me know that it’s okay. This is our destiny: to live on this earth and experience this one life we’re given. If we’re lucky, we love and are loved, and maybe we’re compelled to capture some of our experiences into words.
I wouldn’t have retrieved this deeper insight were it not for the space I carved out last night to do the writing and to contemplate more about the connections my mind is making—from my dream, to Orlean’s insights, to the writing prompt that pushed itself forward last night and said: Why not this?
In The Library Book, Orlean writes:
“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve catalogued and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. . . . It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it . . . it takes on a life of its own.”
It's a call to write. A call to share. A reminder that writing, and sharing it, is equivalent of plucking an internal volume, opening it, and offering it to others.
This is a beautiful sentiment, but there’s also something that precedes it, which is to find the meaning. We must give ourselves the space to probe, to be curious, to self-interrogate. It’s not surprising to me that once I gave myself the space to consider it, the meaning of the dream became clear to me. Or at least I have an interpretation that makes sense and satisfies me. This is what we do when we write memoir. We take the stories of our lives—experiences, dreams, memories—and make sense of them. The meaning we attach to what we probe is the heart of the whole endeavor.
