Honoring your influences, dream edition

Last night I had this oddly lovely dream that I’d been invited to have Thanksgiving dinner with Meg Murray. There were all the usual dream weirdnesses, of course: Meg and Calvin’s grad-school apartment was so small we had to leave our suitcases in the hall; there was this sheet covering the floor for no good reason; and it never was completely clear whether it was Sandy and Dennys or a very young Polly and Charles O’Keefe who lived there with them.

But still. At some point, when we were all sitting outside, Meg got to asking me what my name was, what I wrote. (Even though she was the one who’d invited me over, yes.) Later, I asked her if she’d ever had the chance to get to know her author, and she allowed as how she never did, because L’Engle wasn’t really one to talk to her characters. (I have no idea if this actually true.)

Then I said to Meg, “Well, she [Madeleine L’Engle] was a huge influence on me.” And after a moment I added, more shyly, “And so were you.” Meg seemed touched, and gave me a hug, and I was glad I’d gotten the chance to say it.

The dream slipped back into incoherence after that–something about Charles Wallace offering me an ancient-and-significant twig or something–before I woke up. At which point I wrote the dream down in order to remember it, though that’s something I don’t often do.

Because really, how often do you get to thank one of your favorite fictional characters directly?