You can know yourself, if you bring up those cloudy canvases from your dreams, today, this day, when you walk awake, open-eyed.
Memory is valuable for one thing, astonishing: it brings dreams back.
Antonio Machado, from Times Alone
There’s something quietly unsettling in Machado’s words — the idea that our dreams are not separate from us, but unfinished conversations with ourselves. Most mornings, dreams dissolve almost instantly. We reach for our phones, our routines, the practical demands of the day, and whatever felt vivid a few moments earlier slips back into fog. But Machado seems to suggest that if we pause long enough to carry those ‘cloudy canvases’ into waking, morning-walking life, they can reveal something true about who we are.
This month, I’m engaging in a daily challenge: a three-mile walk awake, open-eyed. Along the way, unexpected memories emerge from their burrows like the rabbits and hares I meet on the path, their distinctive ears attuned and pointing to the sky. In Machado’s idea of abstract art — of cloudy canvases — I recognise something of the colour and ultimately boundless and borderless shape of my own humanity.
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I think that’s what makes memory so strange and valuable. Not because it preserves facts perfectly — it rarely does — but because it keeps emotional truths alive. A dream remembered hours later may not make logical sense, yet it can leave behind a feeling that lingers all day – delight, longing, fear, tenderness, regret, hope, melancholy, joy and gratitude. Sometimes those feelings point more honestly toward our inner lives than our carefully organised thoughts ever could.
What I love most about the poet’s suggestion here is its gentleness. It doesn’t demand certainty or interpretation. It only asks us to remain open-eyed to ourselves — to notice what rises from beneath the surface, and to treat even our fleeting dreams as part of the story we are still becoming.
