This is why, among acquaintances rather than readers, the most common comments I receive are:

'You don't really go to those places, right?'
'But it's exaggerated?'
'But none of it is actually true?'

Those comments are never mean-spirited, only curious. But they imply an innocence about a genre; one of the oldest styles of writing on Earth.

I leave Spellbinder Books with that thought on my mind - what is travel writing, how is it different from fiction and journalism, and why are travel writers so ashamed of calling themselves travel writers?

After college, I began to dream very odd. I don't remember many details. Every morning, I woke up and it was the same thing, if I dreamed, the dream was barren. Sun and parched earth; emptiness and some sort of a lonely world.

Around this time, I had never been to a desert. These dreams may have implied a curiosity about what was beyond Los Angeles; they likely also implied my personal struggles of the day. The desert was my mind's self doubt and lack of content.

Two dreams I remember clearly; likely because I told the dreams to friends in an attempt to amuse them.

Imagine my dream for a moment, and the sky is the blinding color of noon. The ground is white limestone; sand in hard granules. Old pieces of machinery stick up, half buried in sand. Wind propellers or oil canisters or John Deere tractors. Between all this were farm animals bleeding from open sores.

There may be a goat, his neck is bleeding or he hasn't a foot. And the animals made noises like screams and walked slowly. Never did these animals herd; they were just lone props in the setting of this dream.

This same dream there is water; a shoreline of hard, white sand. The water is virtually still. It just laps against the limestone gravel shore in small but excruciatingly loud ripples.

There is a city too, and it’s adjacent to the world of white sand. It rises up without suburbs; it is tall, ornamented in sleek ebony hues and endowed with lavish bronze-colored metals that rose as columns supporting these structures. Buildings were connected. Rather than ceilings, the interiors rise into spires and men and women hurry.

This dream had no inspiration. Entireley the fiction writing of my subconscious. The intricacy of it; its architecture and tension, its landscape, all of it astounded me.

What I wanted to know is: why couldn't I conceive of the landscapes that my dreams conceived of? If I could dream such a complicated world, why couldn't I imagine them during the day? So I wondered: do people have a literal other side to their brain, an independent spirit?

All those titles at Spellbinder Books; do these fiction writers just have a better grasp of that other person in their brain? And is sub-consciousness some real, controllable thing? Might mine have a name?

The coffee guy at Spellbinder Books warns me: once I reach the top of the Tioga Pass in Yosemite, the weather isn’t much cooler than down here. If it’s a hundred-and-five here, it might be a hundred there. This worries me, because I am driving my wife’s car from Los Angeles to Portland. Don’t tell my wife, but her car is a clunker. Already yesterday, I came near to overheating in the White Mountains.