TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

It’s a common joke that no one wants to hear about your dream unless they were in it. And maybe that’s true, because often when someone begins a conversation with, “I had the strangest dream last night,” I sort of brace myself. I’m preparing myself to appear interested — to nod along, make eye contact — because I’m expecting a mishmash of disjointed symbols that won’t mean much to me.

The grand adventures or scary disasters that happen in our sleep are most interesting to the dreamers themselves, because a dream is a window into the subconscious. It’s a little peek into what your mind is actually chewing on, maybe without you even realizing it. You thought you were over that thing a friend said to you, or that awkward situation at work, but when it popped up in your dream, you realized no, it’s still on your mind.

On top of the psychological aspect of dreams, many cultures also believe in the spiritual importance of dreams. They regard them not as odd stories to tell over breakfast, but as messages from ancestors, or wisdom from the spiritual world to be used as a guide in waking life. For example, there are 21 dreams recorded in the Christian bible, most of them in the Old Testament, which served as prophecies, warnings, or guidance.

Today’s poem makes a case for that deeply personal searching we do through our dreams, reflecting on one from the speaker’s childhood. In it, she doesn’t find answers about the past — instead, she finds truth about the present.

The Interpretation of Dreams
by Kate Farrell

When I was ten, my mother opened
a hatch in the hallway floor and led me down 
the steps to board a boat moored in an underground
river. She and I sat facing each other—her in 
front, me in back—as our self-piloted skiff glided
slowly forward with the ritual solemnity

of a lunar vessel plying the Nile in ancient
Egypt. Along the way, she handed me a beaker
of an acrid substance—which I drank without
betraying my great reluctance. Later, I’d wonder
if the dream had to do with prenatal gestation,
while the bitter potion stood for the sort of 

ineluctable pact or daunting star-crossed
lifelong task an arriving citizen of the world
might rightly refuse, if so much that mattered
didn’t hang in the balance. Take the vision 
in Vita Nuova,  where the figure of

Love, who Dante regarded as his Master,
instructed Beatrice to consume Dante’s heart—
the Love whose sway Eliot equated, many
centuries later, with poetry’s transformational power.
As for the expedition that my mother

and I set out on that night, boats tend
to symbolize the searching soul and its plights.
Even in a tune like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,”
a song I loved as a child—or loved its sound
when it was sung in rounds, and the line
that decreed life a dream glimmered

through its drabber lines. Such that 
a kid of ten might begin to suspect that
while rowing your boat isn’t always merry,
navigating the mysteries of the underlying
dream might with time come to seem
your inborn calling and raison d’être.

"The Interpretation of Dreams" by Kate Farrell. Used by permission of the poet.