Dreams

Before discussing the themes and meanings of “Dreams,” readers must understand Pastan’s form and stylistic choices. “Dreams” fits into the poetic sub-genre of the lyric. Lyric poetry captures a speaker’s strong emotions towards a particular subject or experience. It emulates music, particularly singing. Poets can use the lyric mode in any poetic form since subject matter shapes it rather than literary devices. Fixed form poets require certain literary devices to occur in a specific order, such as rhyme schemes and repeated end words. “Dreams” lacks more traditionally sonic literary devices, missing set syllables (where speakers emphasize words) and rhyme patterns. However, its core structure and imagery classify it as a lyric poem. Lyric poems lack a cohesive narrative structure or plot, relying on the speaker’s feelings to move the poem.

Smaller narrative moments do happen in “Dreams.” However, the poem mostly centers around Pastan’s thoughts about dreams and the feelings she receives from them. Instead of telling us what exactly happened to her father, the speaker alludes to the impact of this memory on her. Pastan keeps the origins of the image of the “father / in knickers and cap” waiting “on that shore” ambiguous (Lines 19-21). Is it from a childhood memory or right before the precipitating event? Did she distill all her memories of her father into a single figure? Pastan does not say. Instead, she only clarifies the image’s emotional impact on her. Seeing him in her dreams leaves “a wound [on her that] not even morning can heal” (Lines 23-34).

A first-person singular speaker narrates “Dreams.” The speaker also refers to a “you” and even uses first-person plural [i.e., we] at specific points (Lines 2, 4, 6, 9, and 27). Consequentially, the speaker’s tone feels conversational and intimate. Pastan sews multiple similes (comparisons between objects using like or as) across enjambed lines (when a line flows into the next without a period) in the second stanza. Even when the sentence ends on “a particle of sleep” and a new thought begins in the next stanza, it builds into “sand” in the next stanza, which allows the simile to continue mutating and changing scenery (Lines 12-14). The poem sounds like a one-sided conversation where the speaker tries to get the other person to speak but has no luck.

“Dreams” is thematically complex and contradictory. Loss and impossibility permeate the poem. A contemplative and mournful tone defines the opening stanza/; “Dreams are the only / afterlife we know” sets the readers’ expectations for the poem to examine death and remembrance (Lines 1-2). The statement also draws attention to dreams’ instability. The afterlife represents the promise of immortality, yet the only known afterlife exists in a person’s head. People quickly forget dreams when awake and humans live finite existences. Once a person dies, that afterlife disappears. Dreams hold no definite answers, only what one can tell themselves. The somber tone continues into the following lines. Pastan paints dreams as

the place where the children

we were

rock in the arms of the children

we have become (Lines 3-6).

Parents often calm upset children by rocking them. The repeated “children” (Lines 3, 5) creates a feeling that childhood continues to shape a person and that adulthood does not bring definite answers. “Children / we were” denotes an ending (Lines 3-4). Both the afterlife and different selves meeting mark dreams as a space where past and present mix. Dreams exhibit impossibilities. As a result, these images enforce that dreams can remind people of their losses.

The second stanza emphasizes dreaming as a mournful, emotionally fraught experience. Pastan compares dreams to bleak concepts. “Leaves / in their migrations” evokes autumn, when trees lose their foliage (Lines 7-8). People recall dreams by a sole “particle of sleep,” like learning about a bird’s death by finding a single feather (Lines 9-13).

The mournful tone intensifies in the third and fourth stanzas. Although Pastan never makes her father’s death explicit, she leaves readers contextual clues. In the lead-up to her father, Pastan makes time and concepts feel loose, fleeting, and “irretrievable as sand” in the tide (Line 14). Pastan then evokes images of the grim reaper, the sea, Davy Jones, danger, and the passage of time by describing the sea creeping up the shore with a “long knife glittering / in its teeth” (Lines 15-17). The sea even feels entitled to something it owns but needs “to claim” (Lines 15-18). Because these images immediately precede the dream, the reader already feels a sense of foreboding and loss when they reach the father. Immediately, Pastan links her father’s presence to deep trauma, stating that “the dream of him / a wound / not even morning can heal” (Lines 19-24).

In the fifth stanza, Pastan talks about other beings’ dreams. Despite the presence of others, the poem still feels lonely. The dog does not interact with Pastan, it only sleeps (Lines 25-26). Pastan states, “your closed eyelids flicker,” but the “you” never responds (Line 27). She also speaks vaguely about “your” dreams, if it all. “Watcher and watched” might refer to “your” dream’s specific content or Pastan watching “you” watch “your” dreams (Line 29). It could refer to the “you” as the watcher and their dream self as “the watched.” The ambiguity increases the unmoored feeling and isolation.

The poem ends with Pastan recounting a dream where she found love, only to wake and find he never existed. As she stares at the sky, she imagines “his smile” as “a comet / that has just blazed by” (Lines 34-36). Her loneliness persists.

However, the ending invites a more optimistic interpretation. Although Pastan’s lover does not exist in the real world, she still uses the world around her to preserve his memory and synthesize an idea. She sees the “sky was starry to the very rind” (Line 33). The rind refers to a fruit’s outer layer. The stars transform into seeds and pulp, germinating and nourishing new ideas. The image of the stars as seeds leads into realizing her lover’s smile had the same brightness as a comet, creating a new imaginative concept. Creation begets creation.

In Pastan’s view, dreams reflect people’s lives. They enable people to remember and envision. Dreams allow people to create knowledge and the certainty they lack in real life (“Dreams are the only / afterlife we know” [Lines 1-2]). They also provide a chance to recognize past injustices and heal [“we”… “rock the children / we were”] (Lines 3-6).

Nevertheless, dreams destabilize and shift, making them hard to remember or understand. People cannot know other people’s dreams. Impossibilities delight in dreams. However, the dreamer cannot perfectly replicate those impossibilities while awake. At best, dreams allow people to recognize their waking emotions or inspire new ideas.

The contradictory nature of dreams mirrors life’s contradictions. Both life and dreams offer disappointment, agony, passion, and promise.