I offer today an old poem – from May, 1987.  I still find it amazing that, when I start to think about dreams I’ve had, memory upon memory of dream sites come to me.  In my dreams they are familiar places, yet I don’t know how many times I’ve visited them.  Only once, but with embedded memories of many times? Or repeatedly, given how familiar they feel?  I’m quite sure at least some of them don’t exist anywhere but in my dreams. They parade before me, one after another, dreamscapes perhaps based on real-life places, but changed enough that I can’t match them up.  That half unreal feeling of dream memories was what I was trying to capture in this poem:

Seeing my bare foot stepping ahead on the dock

In afternoon sun

I remember dreaming of wind chimes

The colors of the dream are lit

With different light from those of day

The dark behind the gold

The light within, not from afar.

I find in dreams

A different balance

Lying on my side while walking

Curling smoke-like under doors.

I take grand jumps

Sometimes truly fly.

New power down the insides of my arms,

New currents through my fingers

Long after I wake

The shadow tugs

Drags the corners of my vision out of square

Puts wrinkles in my day

I travel back

In sliding leaps

Inward and sidelong

Through time

Rolling under like surf

Along the large cliffs by the sea

Down the distant inlet once again

Soaring home to the memory 

Of the dream.

©Wendy Mulhern