I remember Adam’s dream as if it had been my own dream, and I recall the spring in which he dreamed it as if I lived that time in his body: fearing the flat horizons that hemmed in Kansas City’s bleak skyline, but fearing the empty city, too; driving the snaking black-tops between his grandparents’ suburban home and our tiny hilltop college and wondering if, on these roads, he touched his life’s outer limits.

At night, standing on the college quad, we could look off one side of the hill and see the glinting, broken-down city. Off the other side, the farmland lay as flat and dark as a sea. All around us howled the sounds of the freight trains, the wind and trains’ whistles caught and echoing within the cage of the red brick walls.

Adam thought he might live with his grandparents for a while after school; he wasn’t sure. His own father had fled our hilltop college one semester shy of graduation, and returned to the tiny Ozark mountain town in which his son was shortly born. How Adam’s grandparents had ended up in Kansas City’s blue-collar sprawl, I didn’t know. Why their son had stayed back in the dying mountains, I didn’t know either, unless his allegiance to the town was born of a brooding sense of fate like the one that seized his son.

A fear of this fate, and of what his birthright might require of him, plagued Adam that spring, waking and sleeping. Sitting in his truck beside a concrete field of orange streetlights, one of the many industrial oddities ringing Kansas City, he told me about the dream he dreamt over and over. The dream was of emptiness, of the void over which the Spirit brooded. A red sphere hung, its appearance neither preceding nor following the void, but emerging as something fixed, revealed. He could hear the hum of the sphere as it revolved, like a planet on its axis, something to be worshipped. He heard a voice say: This is perfection.

Some nights, the dream played in an unending loop. With each repetition, the sphere’s hum grew more tonal, like the sounding of a bell. The sphere’s dimensions remained static, but somehow it loomed nearer, heavier, as if, were he not to wake up, the sphere would overtake the dreamer.

The dream did not require much divination. It seemed evident to me that it came from Adam’s fear of choosing between a known life in his father’s tiny town and the unknown world spread out before us.

I did not say this, though. I watched him stare out into the field of lights, his face and hands cast orange, his tall shoulders stooping. When I left my own hometown a few months later, I remembered the dream, and it became a distillation of the fears I, too, faced. In time, I almost forgot Adam, but at odd moments I would see that red sphere in my mind, a tracking sun hunched and heavy on the horizon.

I thought of Adam’s dream last week when I walked into the National Gallery’s Martin Puryear exhibit. An airy, octagonal space, the room held a rich wood scent. In each of its panes hung an open, wood-wrought sphere. The cerulean sphere in the central pane lured me closer, and somewhere in my mind, I heard the hum in the void and the voice that spoke. The sphere stunned me: perfect and bright. It was bare, but somehow remarkable. I remembered the glow of the orange lights, the hiss of the grasses swaying at the edge of the lights, and Adam’s face double-profiled with its own shadow. In the sphere’s ability to conjure up the long-past moment, it seemed both noble and impish. It also seemed to be a judgment seat, reminding me of the power of the basic shapes and colors intrinsic to human life.

I wandered the exhibit, marveling at the wooden sculptures. Formal shapes morphed into fanciful tools or vaguely incarnated forms. Some, like the wood-funnel turtleneck of “In Sheep’s Clothing,” seem meant to amuse. But “Sanctuary” masqueraded as a gag: comical from a distance, up close, its Cyclops eye and intertwined paws stood on its single wheel as a study in attention, perhaps worship. Like the images in dreams, it and others among the foreboding shapes seemed campy when I tried to describe them later. Peering birds, inquisitive dinosaurs; hunched, half-human lumps: each seemed to harbor the possibility of life, of volition, of a voice that might speak.

I read a plaque on the wall that said the sculptor had been born to a middle-class African-American family in segregated Washington, DC. As a young man, he traveled to Sierra Leone, and then, having made this leap, he never came back. He traveled to Sweden, lived in Japan. Perhaps his time in Africa explained the wall of scythes, saws, and other tools, as broad as old men’s brows, or the dark, womanly shape of a tar-papered monolith. The plain titles–“Old Tales,” “Dowager”–seemed to suggest that if the half-human figures ever had voices, they had been muted in order to allow the shapes to sound in the room.

But as much as they were restrained, they were vigorous, too, pulsing with the significance of invoking Booker T. Washington, Jim Beckwourth, and the mottled history of Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale. They hinted over and over again at faith–“Believer,” “Pride’s Cross,” “Confessional”–and so, it seemed, at fate and the tethers of home. The red sphere turned in my mind.

At the far corner of the exhibit, I came to a room whose looming occupant filled it with a sense of its own emptiness. A smooth wooden spoke connected a spindle to the heart of a huge wooden wheel. I wandered around the spindle and under the spoke, almost afraid to read the accompanying plaque, as if its words might break the figure’s spell. “Desire,” Puryear wrote, was about two fixed forms, defined and forever separated by the bond that linked them. It was about the object of desire’s constant place in the lover’s mind, and the lover’s endless, obsessive rotation around the unattainable object.

Looking up at the spindle and the wheel, watching them gaze across their divide, I thought of Adam and of the turning red sphere. I thought of how it had almost cast a curse on him: binding him to his fears of fate and home as much as it bound him to his belief in something beautiful, and his inherent ability to imagine–and so, perhaps achieve–that distant object.

I wondered if Adam had ever been able to behold that dream image, simply for its beauty. I wondered if he had ever let the shared gaze goad him on to move and do. And I wondered if he had ever left that broken-down city, or that little town. Standing in the gallery, I did not know. As with most dreams, from which the dreamer wakes and goes on long before the story’s end, I will never know.