When Christopher Reeve was blue, memories of Maine would often lift his spirits.

“There’s anger. There’s jealousy. Sometimes when I just see somebody get up and walk down the hall, I get resentful,” Reeve said during a CNN/Time interview broadcast Nov. 7, 1999.

When asked what he would like to do if he were ever again physically able, Reeve answered: “My greatest desire, actually, is to go sailing again, to be somewhere off the coast of Maine, which used to be one of my favorite haunts. And then I probably would like to take my wife and family and disappear on the Greek islands and not be found for quite a while.”

Sailing Maine’s coast was recurring theme with the late actor.

In his 1998 memoir, “Still Me,” Reeve opens with a discussion of an idea he had for a short film a few months after his riding accident. It was focused on a quadriplegic who lives in a dream.

While his protagonist spends his days lying on a hospital bed, in his dreams he is whole again, able to do anything, go anywhere.

In his dreams, he is a lifelong sailor who follows a gentle breeze down the full moon’s path along the Maine coast. His vessel: a beautiful gaff-rigged wooden sloop, moonbeams gleaming off its varnish.

Reeve wrote that his protagonist’s dream was vivid, growing more and more realistic as time passed.

Then one night he finds himself getting out of bed and leaving the hospital, walking out the door, then into the boat, which, “magically, is anchored not far away,” he wrote. “And he gets on board and goes sailing, long into the night and the moonlight.”

Soon his character’s nightly voyages seem so real that when he wakes at 7 in the morning, his hair is soaked. His nurse thinks she didn’t dry his hair after a shampoo, but he believes the ocean spray wet his hair.

Meanwhile, the man’s wife and family have become more and more distressed. Since he suffered his paralysis, he hasn’t been able to pull out of a serious depression. He’s shut them from his life. His children fear him; they no longer know him.

His dream sailing intensifies, becoming more realistic. Soon, the experience begins to lift his spirits. His wife notices the change, but can’t understand it, and he won’t explain it.

He can’t. He’s wondering if he’s going crazy.

Still, he sails on in Tenants Harbor or some other spot along the coast. And there’s a fellow there, an older man who shines a light from his cabin whenever Reeve’s protagonist is cruising by. The old man never misses a chance to see the beautiful boat gliding along in the moonlight.

Eventually, Reeve wrote, the sailor realizes his voyages are an escape from paralysis. He could just sail on, he thinks, until one night he leaves, never to return. And expects that he would die happily.

He decides to do just that, until in his dream he awakens to reality. He knows that he’d be leaving behind his wife. His children. His family.

So he sails into Tenants Harbor and gives the old man his sloop.

He no longer needs it.

When he wakes, he’s again frozen with paralysis. But he has a new outlook for himself, his family and toward recovery.

“That’s the gist of it,” Reeve wrote. “Of course the story comes from my experience, but it’s not my story. I’m different from this man,” he continued, “because my family saved me at the very beginning.”

Reeve also found Maine welcoming when he was an aspiring actor.

According to his Web site biography, by the time he graduated from college, Reeve had performed in a number of respected theaters, including the Boothbay Playhouse in Maine.

– Doug Fletcher