Synkroniciti is happy to welcome back Chicago poet Suzanne Glade with “The Dream I Did Not Have.” When loved ones pass, some of us see them in our dreams, while others, for whatever reason, do not. The dream in this poem was given to an artist, who used it as an inspiration for a watercolor painting bearing witness to the experience.
“Years later/ the grief’s hole journeys behind me,// in the glare of harsh gallery lighting/ an opening reaching to the ceiling// a watercolor—her watercolor/ of calm water breathing on the sand.”
The beauty of this is that the dream is shared and recalled every time she lays eyes on the painting, even though it was someone else’s dream. It’s tempting to be jealous of the dreamer–many of us wait for years for such a visitation with no luck–but Suzanne expresses a wistful gratitude for the message expressed in the artwork. We don’t know what creates these dreams, whether it is something about the dreamer, something about the deceased, or being open and empty at the right moment. What we do find is that many of these experiences, unlike dark hauntings, are comforting. Are they from beyond or are they products of the mind seeking peace?
Suzanne’s poem is set in gentle, rolling couplets with luminous, ethereal imagery, the final line lacking punctuation. There is no finality to this story–the mystery continues past the end of the poem, which joins the painting as a tangible, visible record of the dream. The elegance and vulnerable simplicity of the poem, far more difficult to achieve than it seems, is deeply moving. She creates a sense of absence and dislocation that holds a promise of something beyond this life.
Read “The Dream I Did Not Have” in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
We can never know how we are entangled in the dreams of others. People who Suzanne has encountered by chance outside the grocery store have populated her dreams, along with family members who left this world years ago.
Suzanne Glade is a poet living in an attorney’s body in Chicago—waiting, with everyone in her dreams, to be set free. Suzanne’s work has appeared in Synkroniciti Magazine, Locust Shells Journal, The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum, All Else Pales 2 Anthology A Song, Emerging/Poems About Our Earth, For A Better World and elsewhere. She is also a reader for Ex Ophidia Press.