I’m one of those unlucky souls who doesn’t live an active dream life. Undoubtedly I dream at night, but they’re never the kind to last in memory until the morning. I don’t resolve my life’s challenges or have hallucinatory fantasies or conjure feats of heroism or engineer complex solutions to intractable problems in my sleep. Time was, I thought that was a shortcoming, one of the aspects of being me that never ceased to annoy. I sarcastically told myself for years it was surely a sign of great genius, that my mind was working so hard at being brilliant that it, too, needed to power down.

I knew a friend in high school who insisted his dream life was ever-present and vivid and something he could control, and thinking about our mutual experiments with drugs at the time I’d guess he was probably cultivating the tender shoots of some real, lifelong psychological problems. But at the time, listening to him explain in imaginative detail the colors and context of his dreams, I felt a bit of jealousy. I’d like to experience a dream so vivid, I remember thinking.

I had a girlfriend who dreamed of celebrity, followed the gossip about the rich and famous, spent a considerable amount of her time and attention ogling their lives and over the years I came to realize she was escaping to a place where she was more interesting to herself, hitching her mental wagon to some beautiful people fallacy because she understood she’d never achieve celebrity herself. She seemed so self-limiting.

Then, some close to me are subject to dreams of dread and failure and stress, even when I know their lives to be chock full of success, accomplishment and acclaim. A musician I know suffers from synesthesia, perceiving all sorts of stimuli with more than one of his senses — his mind may be a confusing, bright-lit place, but his songs are dreams he’s able to enunciate into existence.

It’s become easy to consume other people’s dreams and creativity — the world is awash in shimmering, jangling noise and without putting a bit of intention into our days, we risk getting glued to the obsessions, agendas and hearsay that get shouted from the mountaintops, or soapboxes, or the bullhorns of personality.

And so inspiration’s in there: machinations of the finest minds, prophecies and theories and hair-brained schemes too, all serving to remind me of what other people can do capably, proof in the pudding that we’ve all got the capacity for great creativity and expression. But if I’m not careful, I’ll let everyone else do my dreaming for me.

With favorable weather forecast, the last few days of high pressure and before the season’s first snowstorm, I decided a return trip to a section of Colorado I know well and which after my last visit left me yearning for more. What begins as a small headwaters at the Continental Divide streams downward in a succession of meadows, in a few miles grows to be serpentine and slow moving in flat valleys and punctuated by a series of falls left by glaciated plugs of stone, then eventually becomes a whole valley’s worth of water, a tributary to a larger river in the adjacent drainage. Up it, you’ve got to hoof, each pitch up a stone face like an extra buttress guarding a fortified El Dorado of trout and eagles and elk, each pitch a natural barrier to the weaker-spirited or uncommitted. I’m drawn to these places for sheer solitude, and appreciate the sweat and strain it takes to access them. I gain energy from the experience and the challenge, even as I physically tire from the ardor. It’s a ritual purification for me, dosing myself with wilderness, with silence, with open air and uncertainty and physical effort.

After a few miles’ hike uphill and in gracious silence, I arrived to the low end of the basin, and from an outcrop saw the meadow was dry and ochre-colored, one continuous expanse of yellowing autumn grasses, two miles long and level, fringed by talus fields and aspen groves and whole mountainside stands of pine. Rock faces up high above the stream made for precipitous perches for ravens and hawks, while the forests below were wedged full of squawking blue jays and magpies. I walked along its periphery another mile, skirting the edge of the marsh and grasslands, climbing up and over forested knolls set between rock piles and boulders. At a pretty little corner of the river I set up my tent in a narrow patch of flat grass, a squat row of pine forming a windbreak from the east. Exploring in the talus just beyond the pines, I found tortilla chip-shaped dish of granite, perfect for cooking and oddball yoga, a sunset plinth with an incredible view down to the gunsight bottom of the valley.

I stood there in my down coat and thermal tights, looking silly and mismatched but bargain-bought and functional from the puff-ball beanie on my head to thick fuzzy socks insulating my toes. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Unencumbered by inhibition or peer pressure, liberated from lingering vanity, I started to lengthen my limbs and gyrate, prostrating myself into stretches and angular poses, and my joints and vertebrae started slide back into place with satisfying snaps and grinding pops. Practicing my weird wiggly rock yoga, I pushed down hard against the stone, swept my arms as far down and back as they’d go, envisioning how much strength it would take to gather up the whole valley, the whole mountain, the whole universe beyond it. I breathed in the thin, dry air, felt a buzz of energy as the cold air lit up my sinuses, my brow and my face, and for a moment I felt myself falling in parallel with the earth, hurtling through space. I felt singular, one specific mass of energy and thought and muscle and humor, small but powerful. Hoot owls ushered in the stars and with a waxing moon already halfway up the sky, I felt timeless, present, accounted for, but also wonderfully lost in the expanse of the wilderness.

When I woke, a frosty sheen of condensation covered the whole inside of my tent’s dome. I summoned the will to get out of my warm bag just as the sun came up and hustled into warmer clothing, knowing that some pushups and more wonky calisthenics would lubricate the sleeping bag stiffness out of my body. I climbed back to my tortilla chip perch to cook, and while drinking suspiciously good coffee the frigid air and crystalline light teased streaks of tears out of my eyes and down my puffy, pillow-scarred cheeks. Blocking the horizontal sun with one hand, I looked down the valley and realized I could see the far end, where the trail exited the forest. A tinkling like the shattering of glass caught me off-guard, and I looked down below me to realize the river’s margins had frozen overnight, and the early sun was prompting the stream to rip itself open for the day. Miniature bergs and floes smashed and drifted their way downstream, and it occurred to me: are trout terrified of shattering ice? The valley had been deeply quiet, with an imperceptible wind causing a faint, far-away whoosh through the pines, but to hear the panes of ice break apart and the grinding of surfboard-sized plates spinning in the current was truly remarkable.

Walking downstream after breakfast, I noticed the bald patches of leafless aspen and thought about the cusp between autumn and winter and how relaxed the forest looked — like it was ready for a sleep, ready to soak up a winter’s worth of water. I neared the bottom of the valley and tried to figure out my approach to the spooky trout held deep in the unhurried current. A perfect grassy bank was brightly lit by the rising sun, usefully casting my shadow behind me, in front of me a large boulder forming the opposite bank. Despite the collection of ice floes forming a delicate plug across the stream, there was a large expanse of open water to cast into, and I noticed the most delicate, growing crystals of ice anchored to the bank. The structure they formed was thin, just a crystalline crust with sharp needled edges, and it stuck out several feet from each bank.

I made one tentative cast and misjudged the distance, landing my small black streamer a foot beyond the open water, and onto the shelf of ice. Immediately, a fish surfaced underneath the shelf, agitated by the noise. I tugged the fly gently off the ice and it plopped quietly into the water. As it sank I watched a large trout emerge from below, and I did my best to make tiny tugs on the line, enticing the fish. Three or four of these later, and the trout simply flicked forward several inches, opened its mouth and ate the fly. I waited half a beat before setting the hook and had a picture-perfect view of it thrashing back and forth in flight. It fought like a winter fish, sluggish and a bit dull. As I went to grab its tail the streamer popped loose, and and it was free to swim its way back to the depths. Palm acceptably fishy, I congratulated myself on getting the skunk off in this meadow, with its nervous, smart trout.

I reeled up and walked back up the valley, having noted one section that audibly contained a rapid to break up the otherwise leisurely flow. Tromping out the few hundred yards into the heart of the meadow across a vast dry marsh and toward the sound of rapids my sense of scale and distance suddenly felt very zoomed out, my perspective shifted outward to grasp the enormity of the place.

Downstream, I caught sight of a bald eagle flying low, twenty feet off the deck and first I thought it must be about to land. When it wheeled once to the left and then immediately back on itself, it dawned on me it was hunting along the tight horseshoes of the river. I’d never seen that before, and I stood there with my rod dropped mindlessly into the current, watching this formidable bird swoop back and forth, the white of its tail and head swapping ends repeatedly. The thought crossed my mind, who sees these things? How many moments of grace like this happen, beyond the attention span or perception of people like me? A feeling of gratitude, of sheer cosmic luck, welled up in me. I found myself emotional at the sight, stirred and weirdly proud I’d got to see it.

Angling is the balance of what I can’t control and what I can. Taking in what I can through my senses — looking for motion, peering through waters that vary in depth and color and clarity, seeking out hidden fish but knowing their habits, behaviors, the feel of the wind, the cold air — it’s a feast, and I have to combine impulse with skill and experience and luck. The phases of my sensory system in sequence, I’m best adjusted for attempting to solve a puzzle, the parameters of which will never be fully revealed to me. Knowing deeply I’ll never answer the riddle, I’m driven by compulsive curiosity, weird rituals and habits and the sheer visceral reality of it.

I explore conscientiously, gathering what information I can from the river as I see it, and I act with intention, all educated guesses and experience culminating into what are now reflexive casts, rolls and scoops and twitches of my wrists, tugs with my fingers like I’m spastically weaving on a loom. My spirit and my attention are receptive, accepting the flow of the river and understanding that I’ll never understand it, or control it, or even influence it much. I see the work of hydrology and time carved into the channels, structures jammed in place but being worn smooth, gradually, terminally. Suspended in the water are a million possibilities, hypotheses I’ve yet to disprove, and no matter my success on a given day, I realize my answers are as meaningless as the swirl of the current, here one moment and gone the next. The transience of a flowing river dictates to me that nothing is permanent, no two of my moments are alike, and that nothing much matters. The feeling is one of an absence of future, a past in full retreat, where any plans I concoct are vague and change at some peripheral glint.

I find myself wondering whether angling in wild places is a celestial alignment of my mind’s many states of consciousness, of whether I am literally dreaming while I fish. Sometimes I fantasize about where a fish might be, how it might present itself to me, while I reflexively cast and walk, shift balance or sniffle, the lower functions of my brain conscripted to do menial labor. Sometimes, my fantasies are realized and I feel it about to happen; when it does and a fish strikes the fly, I wonder whether I willed it. If you will it, as they say, it is no dream.

Days on the river become gauzy for me, time passing without much resistance and as my perceptions expand peripherally I’m more sensitive and invested in my actions. It can feel as though I’m fogged in, inside a bubble where it is literally only me and my wits versus the river and the unchangeable certainty of perpetual change that it delivers me, and I’ve come to believe this is my ideal state of being, the fullest expression of my interests and abilities. It’s not gained me stature or respect of fame or wealth, but the frivolity of it all makes me deeply, wholly happy.

I can see it — the lashings my line traces through the sky, like painting with a single-string paintbrush, reaching out whiplike, and with a single, sentient barbel, I feel my across and through a fluid world. At whip’s end, there’s a solitary single point in space, one hook; the sharpened expression of my intentions, it’s often met by nothingness and devoid of anything tactile, but every so often, someone is fooled and I’m electrically connected to another living thing, us two orbiting one another until we break away or are released from one another’s grasp.

As an exercise in providing for myself, the literal predator act of survival, my angling habit would prove frustrating and disastrous. As an exercise in fomenting an expanding focus in my mental acuity, in my ability to manifest fantasies and answer formless questions about myself, nothing else I’ve found provides half the impetus.

In dream our inhibitions and the daytime constraints of what’s possible are upended, with chronology, cause and effect all inverted. In my best sleeping dreams my senses are indiscrete and seem replaced with a knowing, unquestioning confidence that what is, is. Perhaps, like anyone devout, I’m fooling myself but it’s the resonance of the belief that makes a dream memorable for me, to emerge intact from the transition from sleep to woke.

My intention is reflected back to me like a mirror and the river provides a living dream to me, a brightly colored, wriggling creature. I take care to handle them sympathetically, given the hook and dominance involved, the pointlessness of cruelty being irrefutable. The colors and patterns and conditioning of the fish are fascinating as well, psychedelic dots and gradients, stout fins and hooked jaws, every one of them a gem to hang on to and ponder.

The complexity and beauty of the land, the scale of it and the scale of me. When I traverse it and interact with hands and feed and shoulders and put my back to it, it sets the stage for my dreams. The trout and the muskrat and the ducks, eagles and chickadees, they play along with me, our existence informing the others’. I look and walk and cast, and with each passing day on the river, I’ve given up caring the difference between what I’m dreaming and what I’m living because I experience them as one and the same.