In his autobiography, the Italian author Giovanni Guareschi has described his efforts to help his young wife, Margherita, during a period of severe disturbance. Margherita felt that she was a prisoner of her dreams. Her first complaint was of dragging her "unhappy feet" through endless streets in the "world of shadows, desires, and fears" (her dreams), where she dwelled all alone. Guareschi suggested, much to her disgust, that she get a bicycle. He insisted that she would feel much better if she would concentrate on traveling by bicycle instead of by foot in her dreams. He would have suggested a car if she had known how to drive.

Several days later Margherita reported that she had obtained a bicycle in her dreams and was, indeed, less tired from her nightly wanderings. A week later, however, she feel into a deep depression. She told Guareschi that she had had to go back to walking in her dreams because she had had a blowout. Guareschi urged her to repair the blowout; if she could get a bicycle in her dreams, she could also get rubber, cement, or a bicycle repair shop. Margherita maintained that she had tried and it was hopeless; she was totally alone.

Guareschi did an unusual thing at this point: he taught Margherita skills in her waking life to use in solving her dream problems. First, he led her by the hand to his garage workshop, where he took his own bicycle from the wall and showed her how to change a tire. After fumbling several attempts, she finally managed to change the tire successfully. He repeated the process a few days later, instructing her in how to change the bicycle tire over and over again. Recalling his experience in leaming to operate a machine gun, Guareschi had Margherita repeat the operation blindfolded.

She seemed preoccupied for the next two days, but on the third she cried triumphantly that she had fixed the bicycle of her dreams and it now worked perfectly.

All was well for several months before Margherita spoke of her secret world again. One night she tearfully told Guareschi that while riding along a narrow mountain road in her dream world, the bicycle slipped from under her and she rolled to the bottom of a ravine, where she now lay, badly hurt. He asked her to call for help, but she felt it was hopeless. She was in total despair, believing that her end had come.

Guareschi rushed out and bought manuals on mountain climbing, which he persuaded Margherita to study with him. They found pictures of the type of rock formation in which she was imprisoned; they studied instructions on crucial movements to climb the steep mountain wall and leamed them by heart. Margherita tried, but in her mind her hands were scratched and bloody, and she felt she had to resign herself to death. Guareschi, in an agony to help his patient-wife, begged her, "Cry out, cry out day and night. Try to call me. Don't stop calling me. Who knows, I may hear you."

Later that evening, he felt he heard a distant cry. Speeding home, he found Margherita humming as she set the table. She confirmed that she had called him in her dream. At last he had heard her, she said. He had appeared at the edge of the ravine in her dreams, had thrown her a long rope, which she had tied around herself, and had pulled her up to safe ground.

Margherita serenely declared, "...I'm not worried any more. I know that I'm ever in danger and I call to you, you'll hear me and come."