They say if a writer isn’t writing, they’re dreaming of writing.

A golden dream of writing.

It’s tempting to get metaphysical about writing. At a particularly point in my writing life, after I had written a few successful children’s books, I despaired of producing something more. Then I had a golden dream of writing. I saw a fountain pen poised above our garden pond and from its golden nib issued a fountain of glowing, golden fish that splashed endlessly into the pond beneath. Dreams can be as mysterious as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, but this one was as pointed as a pen. And, as dreams often do, it included visual puns, a flowing fountain pen, a fountain of living fish and most pointedly of all, a pond, a play on my name. Pond (Roy Lester).

The dream realm is akin to magic as the ancient Egyptians, and biblical writers, understood. (Think of Joseph interpreting the dreams of pharaoh.) The renegade Egyptologist hero Anson Hunter explains it in my novel ‘The Ibis Apocalypse’: “So, you believe in magic?” she said. “Can a certain sequence of words and actions, such as imitation, the replication of a name, image or mythical event produce an event in the real world?” Anson Hunter said. “I believe there is an unseen connectedness between things and by tuning in to this network of likenesses you can attract like outcomes. The trick is to find that invisible skein and draw on it, hence the Egyptians’ use of puns, analogy, mimesis, acrostics, dualities and the like. These links are things beyond logic, like the dream realm where parallel sounds, symbols and stories, while seeming bizarre, hold an inner, often unseen connection with our lives. Glyphs were never just a writing system," Anson said. "They were divine words. It’s for this reason that the scribes were fearful that certain words could have a malignant power and become uncontrollable forces in the tomb and so they would cut off the head of a lion in a glyph, or truncate a serpent or show spears stuck in the back of a crocodile to render it harmless. The hieroglyphs in the Stela of Thoth were the most potent of all. When spoken they were not just sounds, but glyphs graven on the air, real things and entities, image-meanings that took shape and activated a world of unseen forces and alternate reality. Heka, or Egyptian magic.

(From 'The Ibis Apocalypse' in the Egypt archaeological thriller series.)

The dream of a pond, a fountain pen and an endless flow of golden fish turned out to be prophetic.