What are you dreaming lately?

In this contributor smorgasbord, we all delve deep into our subconscious...

We have a bunch of new subscribers, so let me explain how this works. Every three months, I send out a question to each of our contributors and then I publish all their replies in one big smorgasbord. The last one was Where are you lately? in April. This time the question is, “What are you dreaming lately?”

I deliberately choose an open-ended question each time, hoping that it’ll bounce a few different directions throughout the responses. In this case, I liked the multiple meanings of the word “dream.” The contributors could write about their actual nighttime dreams, or they could write about daydreams, or about goals or desires for the future, or about anything, really. The variety is the point.

And the joy, for me, is in reading the responses. They’re such a treasure trove of inspiration and humor. It’s tempting to just write “ditto” under all of them. Because really… well, you’ll just have to read them to understand.

When you’ve read them all, leave your own response in the comments!

I’ll start.

Tonya Morton:

photo by Tonya Morton

Daytime dreams or nighttime dreams?

Night brings the obstacle courses, the endless opening and closing of doors, and unfamiliar rooms. The "Where did I leave that extremely important thing?" and the "Oh god, I'm running so late." Sometimes spiders. Sometimes snakes. I've sat straight up and screamed in bed at night and woke myself up that way. Not lately, but it's happened. 

Daytime dreams, on the other hand, are like gifts with ribbons. The sense of light through a window curtain and breeze through the window screen. Vague noises in the distance. Some Puritan instinct in me always wants to fight against taking naps during the day, but lately I've made myself lie down more often, and I've been rewarded with those sweet, gauzy dreams. The tail ends of daydreams, losing narrative as they drift toward senselessness. The collapse of time, so that I feel myself running barefoot up the mowed grass to my childhood home again, past my mother's vegetable gardens, under that ethereal late-evening sunlight we had in South Dakota in high summer. 

Why is it so easy to sleep during the day? Not only the falling asleep, but the dreaming—so indistinct and calm. Even the waking is gentle. The gradual acknowledgment of traffic sounds in the street, a dog barking somewhere, the rustling noises of life around me in the apartment. A contentment that carries something from the dreams, without placing its finger anywhere specific. 

Sometimes I wonder, if I lived in a place without nighttime, whether sleep would always be like that. 

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Damon Falke:

On dreams

I seldom find clarity when thinking about dreams—dreams in any sense of the word. We have dreams of who we are or who we have been or who we might become. There are the dreams within our subconscious that function as visions. And I do not understand if dreams are mostly about our past, present or future, yet something within us speaks to us and that something is likely us. Despite my ignorance, I find conversations about dreams engaging. Perhaps this is because I am curious about what often stays hidden within us. When another person speaks of dreams, their lives still carry the possibility of larger experiences, of greater hopes, of possibility itself. There are also dreams that whisper an essence. Hemingway dreams through the old man, Santiago, in The Old Man and the Sea. I memorized Santiago’s dream when I was a young man. Today, I looked it up from a copy of the novel that I keep on my bookshelf. The passage is underlined:

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy.    

Did all but love and the lions abandon Hemingway’s dreams as they did Santiago’s? Likely no one knows, of course. But perhaps for a moment they did. What I believe is that anything on the other side of dreams about love is either holy or nothing.

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Paul Vlachos:

Do we really know what dreams are? Does anyone know? I ate some fried okra recently at a cafeteria-style place in Birmingham, Alabama - Niki’s West, a place I know and love - and woke up at 5AM to some crazy dreams. Human words would fail to describe them. The other problem with describing this dream is that I have terrible dream memory. Maybe that’s a good thing. Dreams happen and then get tucked into an alternate memory hole and almost never resurface.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a sliver of a flashback from a dream I had decades before. It’s like having a secret warehouse of recordings that are locked away and there is no key. Once in a while, though, someone sneaks into the room and plays one that I’ll hear through a ceiling vent.

I'm okay with this and have accepted that - in my case, at least - I don't need to recall my dreams. It's enough that I experience them while I'm asleep. Stuff is being worked out and I don't need to know about it, kind of like making sausage. I don't really need to know what's happening.

This might disappoint the Freudians among us, but that's just tough. That's THEIR problem.

And perhaps this response will be enough to pass muster with the rather stern editor-in-chief of Juke, but we shall see. I would not dream of submitting anything that might displease her.

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Tabby Ivy:

To be in a place where there is no rush, no agenda, no forced push to create. Only a quiet curiosity for what is possible and wants to be said. 

….that, and sipping a glass of rose in the Mediterranean summer sun with a cool ocean breeze blowing thru my hair.

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Ned Mudd:

Laurens van der Post relates that when he pressed his Bushman informants to talk about the earliest origins, they seemed to lose their ability to speak, until one night his favorite hunter, upset at his persistence, told him: "But you see, it is very difficult, for always there is a dream dreaming us.”

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Sue Cauhape:

What Am I Dreaming Now?

This is a hard one because I prefer to write uplifting pieces. My dreams have become nightmares centered around death and the end of eras. Everybody I know is going through some form of "death," either literal or transitional. Because of this, I've frequently awakened from a deep sleep with a knot of dread in my gut. Dreams are primarily about our fears concerning change. For the past year, too many changes have darkened my dreamscape.

Dementia has claimed two bright, creative people in my family. Because of that, their families are seeing the end of an era that was filled with celebrations, generous hospitality, and joy. As my sister-in-law clung to a cup of coffee, she stared at us and said, "Now it's the end. It's all over. You two and I are the last cogent ones of our generation." That statement will haunt my dreams for a long time. We're next in line.

How do we navigate these last years? How much "life" will I have if Jeff precedes me in death? We are a decade older than when we purchased "Rancho Pequeño." This year, it's impossible for me to maintain it. My body is breaking down significantly. We're both losing steam as the gardens succumb to Nature. While I miss all our animals, their care no longer saps my energy. I don't know if our "era" is coming to an end soon. Will there be another era for us?

I've dreamed of exploring the country in a van, leaving all this in the rearview mirror; but even that has become a nightmare. I sense the world becoming more inhospitable. Traveling as a single woman has always had its perils, from hostile waitresses to men with predatory goals in mind. So that dream has lost its luster.

I have two beautiful grandchildren who fill my heart with joy, but I have nightmares about them, too. Will those men in the white van of my nightmares steal my children or will a peer whose moral compass is lost guide them into evil? Will I be able to save them?

It must be a disease … dis-ease. I wish I had someone to talk through these things, but my friendships are tarnished by political tension, My closest friend has vanished into memory care while another has disappeared into the morass of the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Therapy has proven to be disappointing, not supplying the intimacy of shared history that I crave. It feels like my world is closing down around me, little by little. It's like the coffin lid is slowly lowering. Even that unnerves me. I don't want to be buried. Not only does the deep, cold grave horrify me but I don't want to be in the way of a new stack-and-pack condo or freeway. Throw my cremains to the wild wind over the stones and wildflowers of Nevada.

My poems explore what's beyond death, but that is merely an attempt to calm my nightmares. All I can do is watch the wildlife around me and know that, while eras end and dreams fade, life will carry on without me. I've done my best to leave a positive mark. That's all I can do really. I guess that is actually my dream now: to leave a positive mark.

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Matt Layne:

Here's my most recent strange dream:

Bowie of a Thousand Birds

I dreamed I was attending a party under a high overpass near the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Artists and acrobats performed intricate Felliniesque acts, and in the midst of it all, David Bowie glided through the crowd to speak with me. He told me he was going to perform but was uncertain what to do. I encouraged him to dance.

As we spoke, Bowie began to transform into a flock of swirling birds. They wheeled about in a tight formation to form his body. The birds were in constant motion, and thus Bowie was ever-changing until he and the birds flew up and away into the stars. I was overcome with grief, so I sat in the tall soft warm grass and hugged my legs and wept inconsolably. A woman in a sequin gown bent to check on me. All I could say, over and over, was, "my friend is gone, and all I am is missing them." I didn't mean to misgender David Bowie, but I suppose if you transform into a thousand birds and wheel away into the cosmos you're no longer a singularity, are you?

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Fran Gardner:

Years ago, I kept a dream diary, but now that I’m in my 70s I don’t remember my sleeping dreams other than wispy fragments. 

But I dream a lot during the day. I’ll be reading or writing or riding the bus and nod off. I’ll hear voices saying odd words and view strange images before jolting awake.

The dream words I take note of and write about are the ones I hear on waking. Recently, they were “milk in glass bottles.”

In structured dreams, ones I create for myself, I’m working on writing a book.

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Anthony Head:

MEMO

Date: July 12, 2024
To: Ms. Tonya Morton, Boss
From: Anthony Head, scribe
CC: www.Juke.press
Re: contributor question/July

Boss:

There are contributor questions that offer an abundance of paths to explore leading to myriad proper and clever replies; and then there are those prompts which lock up one’s mental gears. You have presented me with the latter.

What are you dreaming lately? Such recklessly freewheeling phrasing suggests that I participate in an involuntary mental behavior associated with certain stages of sleep in a similar fashion that I binge-watch Forensic Files, or listen to the Hidden Brain podcast, or read War & Peace in order to then recall my dreams oh so easily and be able to effortlessly recount them back to you with a measure of coherence.

Am I to presume you’re looking for weekend dream recommendations?

What am I dreaming lately? I don’t know… my house? only it’s not really my house, it’s my seventh-grade math teacher’s house. I’m there, I guess, because I’ve been thinking about writing about the metric system. And then the scene changes and I’m playing a pinball machine with the face of Jesus on it….

Frankly, Ms. Morton, I don’t think you’ve thought this one all the way through. There is no such thing as SomnambutainmentTM. Is there still time to change this month’s question?

Thank you.

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Jodie Meyn:

Dreaming. Hmmm.. Not dreaming of. Not imagining. Not wishing or dreaming that... just dreaming. Well...  After a particularly stressful episode of The Bear, I dreamt that nothing but good things would happen in the next episode - but I never got to see it.  I also dreamt that besides whatever else was going on in a I'm-in-a-labyrinthine-house dream, my dearly departed friend was right around the corner - I just never got to her before I woke up.  Any interpreters out there? I'm thinking I'm like Gatsby, with outstretched arms and Tony from West Side Story singing "Who knows?"  Maybe there's something around the corner.  I don't get accused of being a cockeyed optimist very often, so that can't be it.  Maybe I'm just dreaming of, hoping that, wishing we could... 

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Kirk Weddle:

I dream of epic natural beauty. Once in a while, I pack up my ride and my wife Tracy and my pooch Frankie and hit the road. I love road trips, none of the scheduling and timetables of air travel. We live I San Antonio and it takes about 500 miles to get a change of scenery.

By day two, things are getting beautiful, and we get a place off the grid and breath in nature. That’s’ the dream, and sometimes really does come true. 

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