First Dreams
Yes, I’m a writer, but I spend most of my days as an editor. I love being an editor. And one of its gifts is helping shepherd an author’s manuscript through the process of becoming a book. The Emotional Truth of Dreams by Willow Pearson Trimbach and Eva Tuschman Leonard is one of those books. This a book of dreams shared between two longtime friends and therapists. It’s a dialogue about waking and nighttime dreams, nested dreams in conversation with themselves. It’s about creativity and living with illness, about our ancestors—and our cats—and what they teach us about ourselves, about divinity and about living here and now.
On July 22, they’ll be discussing and celebrating the release of their book online.
Some mornings I remember my dreams and write them in a journal, and occasionally those dreams become poems. This poem1 is about the first dreams I had after my father died.
First Dreams
In the first dreams, the ones that found me here, in my home, away from that home where he raised me, he was not far from death. His skin not yet so translucent, so close to skeleton I had only bones to hold, but he was weak, needing my help, and I was running late, held up, always behind, always on the verge of disappointing. Over this summer, in my dreams he’s lost years and wrinkles. He’s my dad when he knew everything. In the latest, I was walking down Van Buren, two blocks from my apartment building. It was morning, a quiet that held the emptiness of a Sunday. Surprised to see him, I exclaimed, “But you’re dead. How can you be here?” “I am.” So I shrugged, accepting it, and we turned to walk together then—like we did when I was in and out of college and came back to live at home, the walks we took around the high school. “Don’t blow it,” he says. He knows me. How I’ll take a gift, and it not being everything, push it away.
I’ve been dreaming about my mother lately. In one dream she stood up from her wheelchair. She could walk. Her skin was smooth. She was young again, like my father in those late summer dreams after he died. My mom is ninety-four, almost ninety-five. She believes, even today, that she’s going to suddenly get up from her wheelchair and it will be like she’s eighty again. She’ll leave assisted living and have her own apartment, be independent, and take care of herself. That’s not going to happen. We can’t go back in time, only forward. Sometimes there’s no going home again. I want her to accept that, to embrace where she is. That’s what I want because it would easier for me, but that’s not who my mother is.
When I consider that dream, I see it as a dream of loss. I see my mother’s younger self as her soul leaving her body.
My book Tsunami is being published by the awesome Unsolicited Press on August 11, and you can preorder it now. Preorders are important. Each order says this book matters as it makes its way into the world. You can order the book directly from Unsolicited Press or Bookshop.org.
There are links on my website as well.
“First Dreams” first appeared in The Prose Poem, Issue 32, https://theprosepoem.com/first-dream/.
It is striking how our dreams (and memories/reveries) of the newly deceased first replicate the fragility and hardship of their last days, and then, over time, return them to us in their bright vitality. And those visitations! How matter-of-fact they are. Lovely post, LeeAnn. Thank you.
The cover of the book is perfect for a book of dreams.