What are dreams if not little stories
one part of our mind tells another?
I turn on the bathroom light to scribble down
one of these middle-of-the-night tellings.
The plot resists ordinary grammar
so some filling-in is needed, some work
on transitions. We edit and revise
scarcely knowing that we do so. Action
is unclear — did he get up and walk to
safety or just lie there? Was that seventy-
five hundred she won, or seventy-five
thousand? Half-asleep, we decide. And waking,
puzzling over our night-scrawled notes, sometimes
we hear a small, dreamy voice say, Just right.
—Thomas R. Smith
Picture Nick Victor