American Oneirology: Footnotes to a National Dream Journal
September 17, 1787
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America*
* In summary, some white men, once, had a Dream and called it “We, the People”
In it they were strange, they were themselves, but multiple, and vibrant
Arguing and singing, skin stretched across the continent like borealis
Or Dakota Badlands rockslide, they were falling up and down and
When they woke they tried to capture it on parchment
All the parts they could remember, they were too afraid to conjure it
But left to us the paper and the words. We are not born
So much as dreamed into being, or becoming, only some of us
White, male, moneyed, others some, or part, or none of these,
But in every generation trying to remember
When we could remember
The Spirit of ‘76 or ‘62 or 2008
Brief waking-dreaming moments when we flew
Schwinn Sting Rays naked over Iowan farms
Blue Angels on banana seats over mountains
Of corn and rock candy and catseyes,
And looked something like the Dream.
And we dreamed our imitation dreams.
And some of these dreams turned to art, money, or both
And some turned to hashtags or Civil War ghosts
And some dreams died in screams from the balcony
Which, dying, opened something in me
A dream in a window which one morning had closed.
One of us dreamed of cigarette trees and whiskey lakes and liberty
Some dreamed railroads and airplanes, canals in Panama and Erie
And some dreamed war and CTRL+ALT dustclouds
And the personal computer and a God we could live with
A God who’d speak like Kind of Blue
And not Alexa or even the old AOL dial tone
(though we dreamt those up, too)
And dreamed a utopia of soviets and satellites
And dreamed three men to the moon
We dreamed in sex, silicon, and Cirque du Soleil
We dreamed without a national tongue
Free to sleeptalk and walk and sing
And sometimes dreamed back to 1633
When dreamed John Cotton of a new continent’s purity
For to allow any man uncontrollableness of speech, you see
(he said)The desperate danger of it –
We kept alive the danger in our dreams
And left the desperation for the living
For often in my waking dreams I am some
Homophobic high school version of myself
In a world populated by people who voted
And people who didn’t vote and relatives
Who don’t remember me. Chasing some
Misguided goal, Grail-Quest without a Fisher
King, or else hurt and bent on hurting
In an economy of pain and qualitative easing
This isn’t, really, dreaming.
But on the same Plymouth-bound ships
Rode some Nadabs and Abihus, drunk
Sons of Aaron and Marianne Moore,
Ready risking Hell for the gift of strange fire,
To give God their tortured desert poems,
Like Las Vegas, Heizer’s City, Everett Ruess’ graffiti
These dreams were good.
How good it is to dream awake at the wheel
And trust only Ike’s curves like a catechism:
So all you funny hats manning mantraps
Up and down the I-90, Seattle to Boston
Take out your radars and point them
See how fast I can go in a Prius
And then we’ll trade places. I’ll wait
In the same service road scrub and I’ll watch
You blaze by, lights blaring for no one.
We’ll sit on hot hoods, engines clicking,
Share beers and stories and when
Dawn comes point your gun at the sky
And track eagles, ospreys, and baseballs,
How good it is to dream with a west-
Ward step to a place where there are
No other faces to reflect your face
Only overmastering emptiness and
Ringing rocks like silent rhyming poems
Until standing at the edge of your tradition find
One who doesn’t look or think or smell like you
But says, I am a dreamer, too.
But after all the Dream that dreamed us
Wasn’t borne from blood to brain but wrote
Us in its ink and told us to do likewise.
So let’s let go like bubbles from the side
Of a Coke glass and burst on the surface
A carbonation of awakening: morning breath
Reasonless, a sizzle and a sigh, from Atman
To Brahman, spiritus sancti and Stevia
Offering strange fire to anyone
With marshmallows, and sitting down
To listen to the stories of their dreams.
Aidan Ryan resides in Buffalo, NY, where he is an adjunct professor of English at Canisius College and co-editor of Foundlings poetry magazine. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Buffalo News, Slipstream, Traffic East, CNN and The Skinny, where he is a regular music critic. Find his work at www.AidanRyan.com.