At a particular point in a stressful life, I stopped painting, sculpting, or doing any needlework. I went weeks without thinking so much as one thought about colour or texture, without an idea for a new garment or song lyrics. And I didn't notice.

What I did notice was that I felt awful. Depressed. Empty but at the same time stuffed with some anxiety that used my heart to bang on the bars of my rib cage in the middle of the night so that I sat upright in bed to fight or flee.

Then, one day, in the cold blue hours of early morning, I dreamed of being pregnant. I had never had a child, but I wanted this dream baby desperately. The labor in a dark and stuffy tent was surprisingly painless and the women who attended the birth, wrapped the baby in a thin ugly blanket and set it down beside me. "It's a girl," one of them said. But when I looked down at the baby's face, I was horrified to see the child was stiff. Made of stone, heavy and motionless as a hunk of rock.

No one but me seemed to notice. 

Over the next few days, I let that dream sit in the back of my mind. It seemed important, so I came back to it again and again. One evening I picked up my journal and held the pen over the page, wondering what to write about - I had had so little energy for such things. I decided to write about the dream before I forgot it, and as I began to set it down, the words began to slip easily onto the paper and the symbolism became clear to me.

The baby was my creativity, which for lack of use, had turned to stone inside of me. No one else would wonder that I hadn't written or painted. And consciously I could make the decision that I didn't have time for it. But somewhere inside me there was an expression of an idea or a feeling or both that was terrified it would petrify before coming into the world.

I don't always remember my dreams in detail, but I try now to get enough time to sleep deeply enough to have dreams and I keep my journal with a pen inside it next to me so that I can write down visual cues that will help me remember as much as possible.

Not all dreams mean something, of course. But I don't want to take a chance on losing one if I don't have to. It could be important and over time, it could reveal more than I ever expected and make a difference I could never have dreamed.