Could Covenant have dreamt of the Land other times than...

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

... written, or by him remembered you might say? Imagine his ten years of nearly absolute isolation even after he overcame the Illearth Stone. Do you think he tried to imagine himself into the Land a lot to compensate for the deficiency of the "real" world? We know he writes a strange book about guilt and power, and is befriended, in truth, by a doctor, and then Linden Avery (who ends up more than a doctor). But we're talking ten years leading up to a sudden self-sacrificing immersion in Joan's bloodletting.

We could, for instance, acknowledge memory dreams about time in the Land, but however vivid this might seem, with the exception of Andelain (it could be said), these dreams are never as gracious as the true dream of the Land Covenant had. This is pretty conjectural, however.

More promising, I think, is the Platonic description of the Land's metaphysics the author has offered (don't have the citation at hand, so I guess if you don't find it, I'm wrong, or maybe I'll find it later). Maybe there is a Form of a Story out there, and the Land is that place. All the plot twists go according to the Chronicles' peculiar logic. So maybe that's when Covenant recognizes that that's logically how the Story would go, and imagines it that Way (if you know what I mean). Perhaps somehow, his role as the Timewarden involved consciously perceiving what he subconsciously dreamt about the past, if not also the present or future, of the Land's Earth.

[deer of the dawn]

Possibly. But are you asking did he visit the Land in those dreams? Doubtful. When he is there he has been summoned for a purpose.

Near the beginning of LFB there is a paragraph about Covenant "creating worlds" with his writing. I've never been able to figure out quite what the connection is (and I do NOT think he and the Creator are one and the same) but I'm convinced there is one.

Maybe the Creator was a writer, and the Land what he created. Maybe Covenant's "creation" is out there somewhere... or maybe he will create a new Land... we'll just have to wait and see.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

There is a quixotic sense in which all the guaranteed "real" world storyline is actually metafictional, a complex metafiction for the Land's ideality. So maybe the old man triggered archetypes in Covenant and Linden that transported them to the Land's Earth, where they continued the story he had started. Now Covenant has perceived so much of the past that he has filled the role of the Creator, just as Linden and Jeremiah have or will, in making particular this imaginary domain. But it is not arbitrary imagination: it is the image of abstract reasoning about right and wrong, spelled out in a context of lore-wrought miracles and desecration, etc. It is like Plato's World of the Forms, only in this place there is a complex opposition (Despite, Love, Apathy, Law, whatever) that individual free will makes an absolute difference to (i.e. in Covenant, Linden, and Jeremiah). There is, then a logical pattern to the events of the plotline. This logic is an eternal structure that is reflected into the coincident dreams of the protagonists, providing them with a transcendentally unified dream-like perception of the world of grace, where health and sickness, truth and dishonesty, can be known by sensory intuition instead of intricate argument. This is the balancing act: as outside the Land's Time, Covenant, Linden, and Jeremiah can interact with the content of the Land on a metaphysical level, altering the circumference of this ideal dimension, i.e. imagine it, in part, into existence ("Her mind cannot be distinguished from the Arch of Time"...) but only according to rules. Time travel, then, is not a violation of causality inasmuch as the travelers are really unraveling the order of the past a priori, that is writing the story but jumping around as they do so. For this is the past of a world on the threshold between the domain of fictional objects and Platonic objects, or some fusion of those, in the Form of the archetypes even?