Throughout my childhood I would often wake up startled to not know where I was. I  would see the room, see all the furniture and the teal light on the walls, and fall into a circling panic of confused surroundings: where am I, where am I, where am I. Last night that happened, I woke up at one moment and was caught there, couldn’t think even of my daughter’s name, just kept saying the names of my sisters—Natalie and Nicole—though I knew there was another little girl. I couldn’t figure it out. The sensation of emergency prompted me to want something I knew was impossible.

I later read about Pan’s magic on man, half man and half goat, unkempt and shaggy, evoking the rupture of rapture and impossible impulsivity. His pipes refuse the discipline of meter, key, and modality; he makes the irresistible music of morning birdsong and the wind humming like a collapsing teal light through the red canyons. Panic.

Clubbed in the darkness. A Light somehow somewhere. The gods offering a chance, waiting to delight in the watchful sleeping man that I am. I would wake up so often as a child in that panic. Then one day I realized that that hadn’t happened to me in many years. I wondered what it was that brought it on and what it was that beat it away. I assumed it was the instability of my early life, the fact of constant movement, and the restless sleep of being prey, fleeing local circuits of migrations outstretched. Once I grew predator the necessity of that panic went away. But now I see that was all wrong.

The Great God Pan has not gone away—Plutarch misheard the divine proclamation; Augustine, burning, burning, was mid forest but afraid; and the child I was had seen more than I allowed—I did not stop to see how I had pulled away.

Later that night, after I composed myself back to self-recognition, I had another dream to instruct me not to pull away. I entered a laboratory that was vaguely satanic, with a scientist there vaguely enthroned. He offered me an apple, an invention of his he said, and I took a bite to find that it was filled with milk. A shock to taste the milk of the apple but also what a delight, so creamy and crisp at once. All very primordial—embodied but completely fantastical—the forbidden fruit of course but also the milk which is the burden of women forevermore for having tasted the fruit: to have to bear children and feed them. And there I was, taking the invention, coming upon it, finding it, and coming in a sexual sense too.

These things we call cosmic powers are the waters let free on a laughing world. I am in my bath even as I write this now. Even the Titans had to take the light’s rush from Pan’s syrinx with unwavering seriousness. This thing of dreams that is a dreadful grandeur and wild joy forever, pouring into us, as Keats said, from heaven’s brink.