A few weeks ago, when I read “Copper Woman,” it triggered a memory of a highly potent dream from my past. That dream had had a profound effect on me and I recalled weeping mournfully while I’d recorded it.

After “Copper Woman” was posted, I searched through my old journals for my own dream and finally located it two days ago. My intention had been to post it in full but, in reviewing the dream and typing it into my computer, I had serious misgivings. It isn’t that the dream is not as closely related to “Copper Woman” as I’d thought. It’s that the dream feels so shockingly primal to me that I have just been unable to bring myself to expose it for public viewing. To do so would make me feel too exposed, so, for now, I will refrain from publishing the entire dream. What I’ll try to do instead is summarize it in a form that I can better live with:

A woman is imprisoned behind a brick wall. She is being held for the performance of a dreadful ritual: she is to be burned alive. I am in a state of terrible anguish about the unspeakable agony the victim is to undergo. More than anguish. The thought of someone going through this hellish process, the thought of what she is to experience, is something just too palpably awful for me to bear.

An older woman stands outside the brick wall and prepares to give the command to begin the ceremony. The woman outside is adamant, solemnly insistent that the ritual be carried out. Her heart is hardened to the ordeal the woman inside is about to endure. I find this intolerable.

What I feel in this dream is a sense of astonishment, complete disbelief that any person could undergo such suffering, and that another could have the heartlessness to inflict it. And I am overwhelmed by an uncanny sense of the impossible: how can an event so totally unthinkable actually be coming to pass? But the dream also has an undertone of solemn dignity that accompanies the incomprehensible cruelty. A primal ritual is being enacted that is beyond my capacity to accept or understand.