Other Dreams

Eric Pan '21

NEVERLAND, NAOMI DEOKULE '21

Other Dreams

Eric Pan '21

What you need to know first is the dream where I meet a boy in a wheelbarrow.

This is the first of many dreams featuring the boy, a boy, any boy.

We converse, and suddenly we are time-travellers, world-walkers, bounty-hunters

chasing a memory of musky masculine souls.

And this is adventure.

And this is the thing about dreams.

It changes and it doesn’t. In another world the boy wants to go swimming in the creek, so we do,

or at least we try to. In the end we are too big and the creek is too small so instead we wade in,

each step tempting blunted gravel yearning to draw blood,

each shiver an analogue for worlds upturned:

I’m either A) In Love, or B) Too Young to Understand.

The world turns and I think this boy has a very sexy way of saying

will you go star hopping with me.

And this is uncertainty.

And this is me, standing on a porch in twenty years suffocating

the mirage of an imaginary wheelbarrow boy.

So tell me this dream means something. Or tell me it’s momentary.

One night he takes me back to the mother in a village who dreamed

for her daughter to be rich and have a theoretical American Mansion.

And this is guilt.

And this is regret.

Her daughter does not have a mansion but she does have a son who dreams

of courtiers and rabbit gods and pale-faced Polish boys.

And this is one more world upturned.

And this is the choking of a dream.

And this is the conflict in our state of being.

And this is for the wheelbarrow boy. Take me to that crumpled world

where the seismometer went crazy and I couldn’t stop

all the pictures from falling off the shelves. You only said we’ll take new ones,

and suddenly this, all of this, is okay.

And this is a beginning.

And this is us, time-travellers, world-walkers, bounty-hunters, star-hoppers, whatever. Whatever.

And this is for the camera. Imagine us lost in congestion between worlds,

caught in transdimensional locomotion, uncertain but not uncomfortable.

Maybe we are smiling and maybe we are saying cheese!

Then he takes me to the outlook where I stand and contemplate

what might be creeks and village houses and a solitary wheelbarrow,

lined up neatly in a mockery of blue-lipped dream interpretations.