Dreams

While dreams create possibilities, they cannot guarantee that those possibilities will happen in real life:

[…] the children

we were

rock [...] the children

we have become” (Lines 3-6),

yet Pastan never indicates that the rocking stops. Dreams may give people the chance to recognize and heal past wounds, but they cannot ensure the healing will stick. Instead, the lines read like an endless cycle where the person must continually use their dreams to comfort themselves.

Pastan encounters this issue with the loss of her father. Her dreams act as an afterlife, where she sees her father. However, she still wakes up sad after them. He stays the same, dressed “in knickers and cap” and “waits on that shore” (Lines 20-21). Her father in these dreams is only an image, not a whole person. She might not ever reunite with him since “dreams are the only / afterlife we know” (Lines 1-2).

The poem ends with Pastan waking from an erotic dream, finding her arms empty and herself “innocent” (Lines 31-32). Her lover left an impact on her, exciting her and inspiring new ideas. Pastan cannot make her lover real. She can re-create him in her words as “a comet” (Line 35). However, the dream “blazed by,” passing her and remaining a temporary joy (Line 36).

Throughout the poem, Pastan wishes to connect with other people. The poem begins with the speaker using the first-person plural:

Dreams are the only

afterlife we know;

the place where the children

we were

rock in the arms of the children

we have become (Lines 1-6, emphasis added).

At first, “we” seems to be referencing humanity as a whole. Pastan minimizes human presence in the following two stanzas to create the illusion. Most of the pronouns relate to dreams. The only human presence re-enforces the idea that everyone experiences dreaming the same. Humans recognize dreams, like “we learn of” a bird’s death through “the single feather / left behind” (Lines 7-11, emphasis added).

However, Pastan reveals the poem as one person’s intimate, subjective experience by changing the first-person pronoun from plural to singular. The fourth stanza shocks the reader with “Sometimes my father” (Line 19, emphasis added). The poem no longer talks about a universal experience but a personal one. It throws the certainty of the previous stanzas into question. If dreams all happen similarly, why does the reader need to know the specifics about the content of Pastan’s dream? Why does Pastan inform the reader that “the dream of him” wounds the speaker so much that “not even [the] morning can heal” (Lines 22-24)? They would not need to know if all dreams impacted everyone in the same way.

Pastan makes her subjectivity and personal perspective more apparent in the next stanza. She introduces non-first-person pronouns. The introduction of a “you” turns the poem into a conversation between two people (Line 27). The earlier “we” now appears as Pastan trying to relate to another person or referring to a shared opinion (Line 2, 4, 6, and 9). The similes no longer appear as an existential treatise or an intellectual exercise. The dream similes run into each other, paralleling someone struggling to articulate their thoughts.

Pastan does not reveal “your” dreams with the same specificity as she does about her dreams. “The reel unwinds: / watcher and watched, / archer and bull’s eye” reads more like generalized descriptions of the dreaming process than the contents of someone’s dreams (Lines 28-30). Dream research from the 1970s showed that dreams helped store memories and often featured familiar places, people, and events. “Watcher and watched” (Line 29) reads like a person watching their dream alter egos. The lines about “the children / we were” meeting “the children / we have become” set up dreams as an area to encounter oneself as a separate individual (Lines 3-6).

Most tellingly, Pastan quickly shifts into another story about her previous dreams. It is as if Pastan hoped referring to “your” dreams would inspire their companion to share their dreams (Line 27). After all, why bring in a direct observation of the “you” sleeping, if she only meant it to stand in for the audience? When, it does not work, Pastan tries a more subtle method. She shares that she “dreamed a lover in my arms” (Line 31). However, Pastan remained “innocent” and alone after waking (Line 33). Pastan notes that her lover’s smile felt “like the tail of a comet / that has just blazed by” (Lines 35-36). Pastan subtly puts forth that she wants intimacy with another person.

Nevertheless, the speaker feels like she keeps missing opportunities for connection. She does not want a fiery intimacy but a gentle and simple one. She dreams she holds “a lover in my arms” rather than specific actions like kissing or intercourse (Line 31).

Pastan’s persona holds great loneliness and loss inside. After all, the poem’s central turning point happens with the father’s introduction. Her father “waits on that shore,” the shore often representing a liminal or transitional space between life and death (Lines 19-21). The implied separation from her father deeply hurts Pastan.

Pastan also shows how important connection is for her subtly. She always refers to dreams as plural. Many images she uses in her similes—birds, sand, and leaves—are also plural or collective (Lines 7-14). The earlier “we” speaks to wanting to share experiences with other people and not alone.

However, she cannot form connections without participation from the other person. The dog does not wake from his dreams during the poem (Lines 25-26). He does not beg for a walk or play to fulfill the instincts encouraged by his dreams. The reader never hears from the “you” about their dreams (Line 27). Pastan can only know and speak about her experiences and perceptions. As a result, Pastan can wish to experience intimacy (the dream of a lover), but she cannot make it a reality on her own.