Here's my first dream of 1999, another festival of decipherable imagery for the armchair psychologists out there:

In the dream, I run an online magazine about the many ways people use explosives at home. Everything is going well until one day when a dissatisfied customer sends a large package that explodes and destroys my offices. No one is injured, but while the building is being repaired, I decide to take a vacation to a city where I once lived. I set off in my new (used) car. On the way, I pass through a dense section of forest, where the road is bracketed by bubbling pools of mud and hissing, steaming rivers. At one point, the boiling water spills over into the twin tracks of the dirt road, but I drive through with only a trace of trepidation that the car will be damaged.

Eventually, I reach the city, and I decide to stop by a coffee shop before going to my old house. On the sidewalk outside the shop, I see two parents who are drinking coffee at a table while their baby plays on the tabletop between them. The table has a single pole supporting the top, and the connection between them has loosened to the point that when the baby wanders too far toward the edge, the whole tabletop leans precariously and threatens to dump him off the side. I'm terrified that the parents haven't noticed the danger, and I'm just about to jump in when I notice that the parents are subtly correcting the baby's crawlings to keep him from tipping the table too much. So I walk on.

I spent the morning of the first day of 1999 by making a number of changes to the 7 Deadly Sins and Tales of Sin and Virtue site to make it a better vehicle for the emerging online journal. They were mostly subtle but satisfying updates that will make it easier for me to do updates, and hopefully make the entries easier to navigate and read. Over the past three months, the Tales have become a more serious priority in my life, and it's been a challenge to reapportion time from work and my personal life to provide the energy and space to write them. Hence the baby balancing on the table. I don't fully grasp why exposing the fabric of my days to the public eye has such immense density and gravity that I feel compelled to continue the project. Yet I feel it's leading me somewhere I've never been before, and I'm inclined to follow.

In the afternoon, Susan and I accompanied our friends Susan and MaryAnne to a "labyrinth walk" at their church. This is a regular event in which the church unfurls a giant sheet of canvas painted with a reproduction of a 13th-century labyrinth from a cathedral in Chartres. People come to walk the labyrinth as a spiritual exercise. There are no wrong turns and no tricks, just one long path that winds elaborately back and forth until it reaches the center, where the pilgrim turns and begins the trip back out along the same path. The entrance is also the exit, but one must pass through the long fall into the central circle to begin ascending back to the material world.

I was captivated by the ideas behind walking the labyrinth as a spiritual exercise. As I watched other people walking slowly along the paths, it looked intensely meditative. It unfolded in the evocative shape of a spiral, and had a yet-more-evocative descent into a central circle that marked the beginning of the exit. Unfortunately, as so often happens in the real world, I found it hard to embrace the physical manifestation of compelling spirituality. I felt painfully self-conscious as I started walking the labyrinth, constantly aware of the people around me. Negotiating the occasional traffic-pattern passes around other people on the narrow paths was a constant reminder of the corporeal world. I wanted something from this experience, and found myself frequently grading my level of ambient spirituality as I walked. I was aware that I was thinking too much, and couldn't stop thinking about how I really needed to stop thinking.

Gradually, I began to focus only on the act of walking. My attention narrowed to the point that I slowed down to a near-crawl. Other people began to speed up, and their movements developed a random, careless quality to my eyes. I concentrated on every motion my body made, on each careful placement of one foot before the other. I tried to make the sensations of every step -- the pressure on the heel shifting forward, the ball of the foot making contact with the floor, the toes meeting the ground and shifting to provide balance -- perfectly identical to the step before. When I reached the center, an odd thing happened. Unlike most labyrinth-walkers, who paused at the center to meditate for a while, I wanted only to keep going. I was in no hurry to leave the labyrinth, but my attention had become so thoroughly subsumed in walking that I was unwilling to shift it to anything else.

Many people passed me on the way out of the labyrinth. I was moving extremely slowly. Then I began to notice the people around me, and the concerns of the everyday world began to reassert their preeminence. I found myself irritated with the woman who felt compelled to walk the labyrinth in a goofy sort of interpretive quasi-Native-American dance. MaryAnne passed me by, and I wondered if I was going to hold everyone up by moving so slowly. The background music, provided by a harpist who threw an occasional Christmas tune into the New-Agey repertoire, grew repetitive. And I began to feel a little disappointed that yet another stab at spirituality seemed destined for rationalist deconstruction in my mind.

I felt that perhaps I hadn't really attained the center; I was so focused on my walking that I had not yet sat down at the middle and waited for something to show me the way out. It's strange to want something so much and yet not know how to find it.

The car in the dream, by the way, is real. Susan and I bought a used car to replace the beloved but irresponsible red Porsche. We lay around in bed this morning speculating what we should name it. The old car never acquired much of a personality, and the failure to give it a name may have been a principal cause. I was flipping though a copy of Dante's Inferno, thinking about my dream drive through the underworld's bubbling mud and boiling rivers, and a business card fell out on my lap. It belonged to Susan's late father. I had the unsettling momentary sensation of seeing the exposed machinery of the universe. We named the car Virgil.