Journal, Day Four

I used to be fascinated by dreams. My dreams, of course—nothing is more boring than someone else’s dream. For a while I wrote them down; for a while I believed it was the special province of poets. It was at this time of year, late winter, that I dreamed most vividly: . . .

It’s winter and I and someone else find a cache of spring flowers

I open a secret cupboard in a wall and find a cache of beautiful linens in deep purple, green, and red, silk and velvet. I wonder why my mother has hidden them away.

My mother Demeter, I suppose....

Dreams seemed a parallel life, an alternate sensorium. Perhaps they were models of what good poems should be: “The teller of dreams sometimes enjoys his dreams as original work,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. But I wanted this work to come to me like the voices in Cocteau’s radio, proof that there was something out there beyond myself, the way children want the trees or their stuffed animals to talk back to them: “...once the toy becomes animated, it initiates another world, the world of the daydream,” writes Susan Stewart.

“The dream of coming on new grammatical structures, a new alphabet, even a new way of reading, goes on—almost as a way to create a new human” writes Fanny Howe.

And Barbara Guest: “Reading Poe, we discover that ‘things are not what they seem to be.’ This discovery was introduced to us earlier by Shakespeare where the actors wear disguise, or their true identity is hidden even from them.”

So I went, in search of the the hidden thing that may have been my “true identity.”

An unexpected thing happened when I had my son: dreaming became frivolous. Not only because I was sleep-deprived and too time-deprived to write dreams down when I did have them, but because it seemed that once and for all Nature talked back to me. I read somewhere the Japanese consider the newborn a kind of god for the first few weeks of life, and I’ve had strangers tell me my baby staring off into space was seeing angels.

Reality had finally caught up with my expectations of the marvellous.

My Russian grandmother has a whole philosophy of dreams handed down to her from the mists of peasant legend. I know she takes it very seriously when she dreams of the dead; they predict corresponding maladies: this one her arthritis, that one her indigestion. Then I remember it was the Russian Formalists too who theorized that poetry must have strangeness in it. Studying Russian as a little girl, I would read aloud from children’s books, usually fairy tales, like Goldilocks. Maybe I’ll always associate those illustrations of a kerchiefed devochka wandering in the wood with the slow decipherment of the Cyrillic alphabet. Maybe language was always the primal dream: getting lost in it, and finding my way out of it: cutting an elegant path through it.