From the Guest-Editor

Dreams are, without a doubt, one of the most mysterious parts of our lives. During the night, while we are asleep, we visit alternate worlds, lead alternate lives, live in different houses, in different countries, with different mates and different children. These dream worlds are inhabited by the dead, who appear to be perfectly alive. The experience of dreaming is so convincing it seems completely genuine until we wake up. Then, as Marvin Bell puts it in “About the Dead Man’s Recent Dreams,” “There are only the clues left gasping when the tide recedes.”

Just what, if anything, do these nightly visitations mean? Do they reflect the experience of our souls, wandering away while we sleep? Are they random exercises created by our restless brains, which continue to be active while we sleep? Or do they have meaning, an attempt at communication from another realm of the self, one that is often out of reach? Note that everything in nature has at least one purpose, and often more than one. Why waste the great energy that goes into creating dreams if they don’t have any meaning? On the other hand, why not use these dreams to send important messages? For, as Freud and Jung have thoroughly convinced us, there is a part of ourselves that remains hidden from us—the unconscious. This is where the psyche, our emotional core, is found. Indeed, the very fact that we dream is itself sufficient proof of the existence of the unconscious, since we can’t claim that we consciously created our dreams. For Jung the dream is the vehicle that carries the message from the unconscious self to the conscious one, and the message, which is conveyed symbolically, concerns our psychic balance.

Or, as Kafka personifies it in his sublime parable “An Imperial Message,” it is a crucial message from the Emperor—the unconscious—to us. Thus, for those who manage to recall their dreams and make an effort to interpret them, dreams make it possible to monitor our spiritual and psychological states. Not all dreams are equal, of course, but the most vivid are almost inevitably important messages that should not be overlooked. As it says in the Talmud, “A dream not interpreted is like a letter unread.”

Dreams are the earliest fictions. Because they are narrative fantasies, it seems likely that they served as the model for mythology. As Joseph Campbell said, “Myth is the collective dream of a people.” Conversely, it seems fair to say that a dream is a personal myth. By examining its symbols and motifs, we can begin to perceive the obscure mythic patterns that govern our existence. Indeed, it is possible to see a distinct bridge from dream to myth to legend to folktale to literature. Each draws on its predecessor, keeping the narrative central, and each portrays imaginary worlds that resemble this one.

So dreams can be seen as the ultimate inspiration for all kinds of stories. And no one can doubt that the hidden world of dreams, filled with vivid imagery and charged with emotion, is a ripe subject for writers.

This issue of Natural Bridge is a special issue on dreams. We have been fortunate to gather extraordinary poems, stories, and essays on the topic of dreams. We even have a section of actual dreams. Brief as it is, it offers examples of the creative genius of the dreamer. Here Jana Heffernan recounts a highly imaginative dream about an elusive fish-girl. David Meltzer offers dream fragments in “Dream Reels” that are as profound as they are brief: “Buying you a bird which refuses to fly or speak and in fast-motion decays and dies and is a tiny pyramid of muddy feathers.” Michael Castro reports a dream about his father that retells the Greek myth of Charon:

My father is traveling in the underworld, navigating a kind of soapbox boat, but the planks split apart leaving him standing knee deep in River Styx mud under an overpass that reminds me of the West Side Highway. He bargains with Officer Charon, shows him the little Police Benevolent Association badge he keeps pinned inside his wallet. He’s requesting a sturdier form of transformation, he says, then corrects himself & says transportation—he demands a better value considering the price he must pay. He bargains confidently, with a deep faith in the process of negotiation itself, if not reason.

In the other sections of this issue, each writer approaches dreams in his or her own way, and offers their own understanding of what they are and what they mean in poems, stories, and essays. Yet in all of them the dream retains its mystery. In “Looking into the Eyes of Wolves,” Mardelle Fortier writes of “stumbling out of the caverns of sleep,” “carrying a poem.” Here the dream is a journey into a primitive part of the self, where the “wolves,” the primal forces, make their home. Dangers abound, but Fortier emerges with a treasure, the poem. In “The Fisherman of Treasure Island” Allison Creighton dreams that she is a mermaid reeled in by her estranged brother. Yet when he unexpectedly shows mercy and lets her go, the dream indicates some hope for their relationship.

Many dreams involve journeys. In “Nightmare in Belém Do Pará,” James Bogan wanders in a city at night. In “Elephant Dream,” Ira Cohen travels to an elephant graveyard, and comes to realize “I cannot show that place to/ anybody.” In “Someone Else’s Script,” Gene Doty dreams that “The woman and I go into the woods to see the black bear cub,/
Who is my friend. I find he has grown huge and fierce and sniffs the woman.”

Dreams offer images for all the stages of our lives. For John Pleimann in “Come Shivering to Collect,” the dream brings a mysterious encounter: “A child with a full moon face/stands at my front door./ He has come to collect for something.” For Iven Lourie, in “A Question of Memory,” “the dreaming mind brings back those best emblems of youth,” such as “that nymph who takes off her clothes.” While in “Fever Dream” Linda Pasten describes “an old book, once brimming/ with language, whose splayed pages/ shrivel to ash.” In “Dream Space” Diane Wakosi is left with just “this tatter/ of dream cloth,” “your navy-jacketed image walks away from/me on some one lane road.” Yet this fragmentary image stirs memories in her “like the smell of saffron.” Others report various dream visitors, who come bearing various messages. For Karen Alkalay-Gut in “The Old Queen of Dance,” this figure haunts her dreams to teach her how to let go of this world, to “make dying easier.”

Other writers draw on dream logic, creating their own surreal worlds. S. L. Wisenberg’s “Demons” portrays dreams spilling out and affecting others. In “The Frozen Rabbi,” Steve Stern tells of a teenager who finds the frozen body of a rabbi in his family’s freezer. He melts the ice and the frozen rabbi comes back to life, establishing an unlikely partnership with the boy. In Natalie Reid’s parable “The River Daughter,” a young girl searches everywhere for her mother and discovers that her mother was the river, and that “She was a river daughter now, and had to learn to be a river.” These two stories speak of the need to find a true parent beyond the imperfect ones we were given at birth, even if that parent must be brought back to life, miraculously, as with the frozen rabbi, or even be an inanimate object, such as a river.

Some of the poems included here are responses to some of the famous dreams of the Bible. Janet R. Kircheimer tries to visualize Jacob’s dream in “Blessing”: “I long for stones to put under my head,/ to dream of a ladder that reaches/ into the sky, where angels go up and down,/ to know that God was in this place.” In “Poem on the Young Dreamer, Joseph,” Israeli poet Yair Hurvitz offers a different perspective on the most famous dreamer and dream interpreter of the Bible. And there are other parallels between dream and myth. In “The Wailing Woman,” for example, Kendra Paredes Hayden draws on Azetec mythology, describing a goddess who is the patron of women who die in childbirth or miscarry. This goddess and others like her are said to accompany pregnant women: “They glide and slide around her never touching her always guarding her.” These writers might be said to create dream worlds of their own, drawing on mythology, folklore, and their own imaginations. When they are successful, their writings have the hypnotic power of dreams.

The mystery of dreams is itself the subject of some of these poems. In “Nostalgia,” Marjorie Manwaring looks back at a time when “Dreams meant something.” Eve Jones offers some unique advice in “How to Dream”: “Listen: your dream is a thread that sings in the needle.” In “Jugged Dreams,” Gene Doty describes “five hundred dreams preserved/ in heavy syrup, sealed/ hermetically in a glass jug/ they float in sweet darkness.” Jules Superville speaks of “My body filled with dreams.” In “Writing at Night,” Eva Eliav describes the onset of sleep and dreams as “that time of night/ when travelers forget/ their origins.” For Jane Wayne, too, in “Night Travel,” dreams are a kind of journey, “some destination never specified/ but clearly urgent.” In “Dreamfish,” Peter Carlos compares the process of capturing dreams to fishing: “at dusk/ we return with our catch/ of dreamfish/ suspended/ from a gold string.”

Above all, these writers draw on their own dreams. These dreams both contain and reveal secrets for the writer to elucidate. In “Dream at Sixty” Joan Larkin dreams that she is happily pregnant, about to give birth, her body “at high tide.” In “Harvest,” Spencer Hurst dreams that “The tree of life is a stump/ in the middle of a moth dust desert.” Morton Marcus dreams, memorably, that “my spine/rises before me, rattling,/ and my body shakes./ It is the chalky remains/ of the snake I once was,/ bristling in front of me.” In “Cauchemar” David Slavitt considers the nightmare, so powerful that when he wakes “fear/ still floats in the dark.” Collette Tennant also writes of nightmares in “Bad Dreams:” “You are the ice storm that hits/at three in the morning.” For Linda Zisquit, though, in “Beauty and Sanctity,” the stuff she prepares in a dream is made with the intention to “prevent all/ catastrophes to come/ or protect the ones I love/ from dark events.” In “Girl in a Red Coat,” Sandra Marshburn dreams about “a girl in a red coat/ who walked into a river like the one/ that flows past my house.” On waking she associates this coat with “the new one I was wearing/ when I fell into a playground puddle/ and fulfilled my mother’s prophecy/ that I would ruin it.” Thus an ancient humiliation comes back to haunt her—and, perhaps, to be finally resolved.

Many of the writers included here not only explore dreams, but also the mystery of sleep. In “Practice Run” Seymour Mayne asks, “What is this sleep? Practice? I put up my feet to float into reverie.” In “Another Day,” Myra Sklarew describes sleep as “A chariot which has driven me/ all night through an ancient street.” Or, as Marqarita Engle put its in “Translations,” “dream and sleep are two faces of the same mirror.” In “Tree,” the great poet Pablo Neruda imagines he is a tree sleeping: “I closed my eyes and my leaves.” For Matthew Schmeer, sleep is elusive: “We drive all night looking for sleep. We can’t find it.” In “Sleep,” Wendy Wisner also searches for sleep: “I would lie, cheek against the creaking floorboards listening for the ocean until I heard nothing and slept.”

Then there is another kind of sleep—the sleep of death, “with night in my eyes and dirt in my ears,” as Chard deNiord puts it in “Abelard Speaks to Heloise from His Grave.” Like everyone else, writers have a hard time imagining a complete cessation of existence. In two poems from The Book of the Dead Man (Recent Dreams), Marvin Bell writes about the dead man’s recent dreams. In “Death,” Michael E. Stone asks, “Is that what death is, /An endless, out-of-body experience?” In “Dream Compost,” Janet Eigner reports that she plans so well for the future, that she dreams of digging her own grave. In “Dreams Mean Nothing,” Barbara Daniels dreams “of my sister and me/saving combings of hair in a Mason jar./ We meant to burn them before we died.” This last sentence informs us that her sister, while alive in her dream, is no longer living. While in “Night Vigils” Maureen Tolman Flannery describes a man who has not realized that he has died, and “He is restless in the turmoil of afterlife.”

Readers should find our section of Dream Essays especially interesting. Here experts present their perspectives on dreaming. In “On Dreams,” Moisy Shopper, a Freudian psychiatrist, offers a scientific view of the origin and purpose of dreams. In “Dreamwork: A Basement Story,” Barbara Platek analyzes one of her own dreams from a Jungian perspective. In “The Song of Songs as Dreams of Love,” Barbara Black Koltuv, a Jungian analyst, describes ancient views of dreams found in the Kabbalah, the mystical texts of Judaism, and applies these methods of interpretation to the dreams of her patients. In “The Dream of Irma,” Rodger Kamenetz returns to Freud’s seminal dream about his patient, Irma, and demonstrates, quite convincingly, that Freud got it all wrong.

As all of these essays underscore, dreams are an essential tool to therapy and to therapists, including self-therapists such as Lianne Spidel, who traces the implications of a series of dreams about houses and rooms in “Architectural Dreams.” A most unusual piece is Marc Kaminsky’s “Task of the Dreamer.” This is presented as the report of a therapist recounting the story of a Holocaust survivor who came to Palestine after the war and fell into a sleep that lasted forty years. On awakening, he makes a terrible discovery. Here I must acknowledge that our staff was perplexed about whether to categorize this piece as fiction or memoir. Although we have included it among the essays, it is likely a clever retelling of the ancient Talmudic tale of Honi, who slept for sixty years, with a political agenda.

Every issue of Natural Bridge includes a miscellany of fiction and poetry, and this special issue is no exception. Readers should not overlook our sections of general poetry and fiction, where the selections are often as imaginative as those based on dreams. We are gratified that this issue of Natural Bridge has drawn some of the best-known contemporary writers, such as Marvin Bell, Carol Bergé, Jim Bogan, John Brandi, Michael Castro, David Clewell, Ira Cohen, Moira Crone, Gene Doty, Jeff Friedman, Isaac Goldemberg, Renee Gregorio, Rachel Hadas, Rodger Kamenetz, Barbara Black Koltuv, Curtis Lyle, Morton Marcus, Seymour Mayne, David Meltzer, Jerred Metz, Mark Mirsky, Pablo Neruda, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, Steve Sanfield, David Slavitt, Myra Sklarew, Gerald Stern, Steve Stern, Arthur Sze, Diane Wakosi, and Jane Wayne. In addition, there are a myriad of poems and stories from remarkably talented contributors, some well established, some starting out. In all instances, our primary consideration was the quality of the submissions.

Natural Bridge is the literary journal of the MFA program of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It is edited as part of a Literary Journal Editing class in which the staff, consisting of MFA students, edits the journal under the guidance of a guest editor, in this case, Howard Schwartz. Students formed teams of section editors and selected the submissions they felt most worthy of consideration from a large pool of submissions. There was an extensive process of winnowing, intensive discussions, and votes by the staff, which eventually resulted in the final selection of poems, short stories, and essays included in this issue. I am exceptionally proud of these student editors, who took their roles seriously and made decisions in a professional manner. In particular, Jen Nord, our Managing Editor, did a wonderful job of keeping track of the submissions in the various stages of their consideration. Above all, I want to express grateful thanks to Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr., the ongoing editor of Natural Bridge, who has been an ideal partner in this undertaking, handling his editorial duties efficiently and always providing well-considered advice. The support of Steven Schreiner, Senior and Founding Editor, and Mary Troy, Director of the MFA program, were also essential.

We are pleased to dedicate this issue to Donald Finkel, our first visiting poet and an inspiration to the students of and faculty of our program. In his many distinguished books of poetry, Finkel draws on myth and dream to convey his vision of the role of poets in our culture, where “each day/ they construct anew/ not merely their own/ truncated lives/ but the language of the tribe.”

—Howard Schwartz