One writer who has had a profound influence on me is Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who passed away from cancer in August 2015. A year or so before he died, shortly after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he and his partner, Billy Hayes, decided to record some of his thoughts on tape. You can listen to his voice via one of Radiolab’s latest podcasts. Here is a transcription of an excerpt from those tapes:

A Conversation on Dreams

Feb 6, 2015

“I’ve been having a lot of strangely archetypal dreams of a journey I have to make. Getting lost and getting found, full of surprises, maybe going through a door which I think will be a door unto another one, a door to a mountain landscape. Sometimes frightening ravines, or having to edge along very narrow ledges, but then finally coming to some gracious, heavenly mountain meadow, and then waiting. Dreams about journeys approach an end. It’s a journey from where to where?” -Oliver Sacks

The prompt, then, is to write your own dream of a journey from where to where. What do you imagine you would dream near the end of your own life?