When I dream about the Good Life Halfsy, I always finish. I’m always ready enough, it goes smoothly enough, and I finish it, in the dream.

I bring it up because it’s a far cry from most of the dreams I have about my life’s major activities.

My teaching dreams were often dominated by screaming students, and my speech dreams were about events I’d entirely forgotten to prepare. In any of them, I might forget my shoes, or fail to find the place altogether.

I have multiple, vivid dreams all night, every night. Have for as long as I can remember.

That’s a lot of material to muck around in.

“Does anyone like hearing about other people’s dreams?” the writer Ted Kooser once asked me, gently, after I handed him a poem about a recurring dream and my dying mother. I was 23, and sad, and trying to write poetry. Ted, a kind man in his 70s, was running poetry seminars a few days a week at the university. Did I mention he won a Pulitzer?

He was passing the advice along—that people don’t care about other people’s dreams—and said a teacher of his had once pointed this out to him too. Maybe he’d tried putting in print a smoky dream, using the words to pin something down.

What were trying to get away with? I think I’m just trying to understand what my brain knows, or at least what it’s working on.

I took Ted’s feedback seriously, but I didn’t scrap the poem. It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. It does something for me. I sent it out for publication for a few years, thinking maybe someone else would hear what it was doing. Nobody bit, but that’s okay. Like a lot these projects, turns out, it’s a thing I’m doing for myself.

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