In Gail Anderson-Dargatz's breakthrough novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, a female character is chased by a transforming spirit. In A Recipe for Bees, a female protagonist travels through time. In her Turtle Valley, a woman and her family are haunted by ghosts.

So fans of her fiction shouldn't be too surprised to learn that in her latest novel, The Spawning Grounds (Knopf Canada $32)-very significantly set in the Adams River area of the B.C. interior-there's a wandering soul who slips back and forth from "watery boundaries"; in the river to inhabit the bodies of people.

Fiction and dreams are close cousins. And so, as the late writer Margaret Thompson pointed out, 'magic realism'-premonition, dreams, synchronicity, second sight-is an integral part of her novels, as much as her rural B.C. landscapes.

"In the years immediately after my mother died,"; Anderson-Dargatz recalls, "I dreamed of her. In these dreams, we often walked a familiar street and talked about writing, about my kids. My mother offered advice as she always had. Then we embraced and she left me, again. Once, my father was with her. In one of those lucid dreaming moments that are so rare, I asked, 'How can you be here? You're both dead.' And my mother said, 'We're not real.' But they both felt so real, so very real. I hugged them and said, 'I miss you both so much.'

Gail Anderson-Dargatz woke, heart-wrenched, convinced she had spent a few precious minutes with her parents.

"These are the moments in which we say our goodbyes,"; she says. So it's an obvious question to ask: Do you believe in ghosts?

"No,"; she says. "I don't believe our souls survive death. But, yes. We see the ghosts of those we love in our dreams, and in our grief, and we see them walking on the street. They appear at the foot of our bed in the wee hours hovering in that space between sleep and wakefulness.

"Sometimes these encounters frighten us. But for the most part I believe that within these final visits with our beloved dead we find solace and closure. I know for a fact my mother's spirit lives on, in the stories I tell, in the bits of wisdom I pass on to my children.

"I see my mother in my own lovely daughter, in her haunting grey-blue eyes, in her grace, her humour, her will, and her ability to read the emotion of a room. I know when my life ends, my daughter will carry my stories and sensibilities forward. She will see me in her own children. And just as I carried on my conversation with my own mother long after she was gone, my daughter will visit me within her dreams."; 978-0345810816