Can Travel Be Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of? For One Woman, Absolutely

When I travel, I go into overdrive, cramming as many experiences as I can into every day. It's a matter of getting the most for my money and time. But no matter what, I still have to sleep for at least eight hours. If I skimp, I pay a price in a kind of foggy-headedness that makes the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower seem ordinary and turns converting currency into a dangerously difficult task.

We spend a third of our lives in sleep. Over the years, I've realized that snoozing isn't necessarily a waste, particularly when I awake and remember my dreams.

I love to dream and find that, for no reason I understand, I do it more consistently and vividly on the road. When I stayed in a hotel room overlooking the Cevennes Mountains of southern France, I dreamed I was a medieval princess, wearing a wimple and attended by two rail-thin bloodhounds. Sleeping in a tent pitched in a rain forest glade near Berner's Bay, about 35 miles north of Juneau, Alaska, I dreamed I was a salmon, fighting my way upriver to the pool where I was born. St. Teresa of Avila appeared in one of the dreams I had in a bed with a cross over it at a Carmelite monastery retreat center in New Hampshire. This probably happened because I'd been reading "Interior Castle," a volume of memoirs by St. Teresa, just before falling asleep. When a sneak thief entered my room in a pension on the French Polynesian island of Huahine and woke me suddenly, I had my wits about me enough to scare him away, even though part of me was still fleeing the volcano that had been erupting in my dreams.

In torpid tropical climates, my dreams are especially compelling, full of close calls with disaster and encounters with people I haven't thought of in years. This may run in my family. My brother recalls that he dreamed he was being chased by Charles Manson while sleeping on a screened-in porch at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. He woke up and screamed, only to find a mosquito buzzing around his ear.

I don't know if women dream more than men when traveling, though I believe that the two sexes travel in different ways. Men like to do, while women like to be, which is why some of us value simple conversations with strangers more than, say, bicycling over the Khyber Pass. So it seems to me a very female thing to see enriched dreaming as a noteworthy and welcome, if unexpected, fringe benefit of travel.