David Updike
Keeping the Dream Alive

I almost never remember my dreams. This feels like a loss, because when I do, they offer glimpses into how the subconscious folds time and space to shape new narratives, much like an origamist folds pieces of paper to form little animals. It’s the kind of strangeness I strive for, and occasionally achieve, in my writing.

Once in a while, I have a vivid dream that demands to be remembered. It’s like when you watch an intense film and keep running scenes in your head for days afterward. I had one such dream decades ago, parts of which stayed with me long afterward. Luckily, I wrote them down in a notebook. I’m at a reunion being held in a former grade-school classmate’s backyard. We’re all grownups now, but we’re engaged in kids’ activities like playing in the sandbox or on a swing set. I say grownups, but one person’s body has shrunk to the size of a doll’s, while her head remains normal size. Her husband pushes her on the swing, and she squeals to go higher and higher. Oh yeah, and the landscape surrounding the little fenced-in yard has become a huge gravel pit whose steady erosion threatens to devour us. 

The symbolism seems almost too obvious to bother with: passage of time = impending oblivion. Still, every few years I’d take another stab at writing about it, always with unsatisfactory results. I couldn’t find the story in it. I’d set it aside and try something else.

Italo Calvino said fantastic literature’s “best effects reside in an oscillation between irreconcilable levels of reality.” For writers like Calvino (and Kafka, Borges, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, etc.) “reality” includes not just the observable world of the senses but also the interior world of dreams and imagination. In their best stories, the strange and the mundane flow in and out of one another, with the author giving primacy to neither and refusing to reconcile the contradictions.

Last year, while fishing for ideas, I came across that old notebook. Now I could read the dream with more distance, not just from the childhood it evoked, but also from the version of me that dreamed it. I found myself thinking about the cluster of experiences that shaped our little cohort—the kinds of memories we might share if we were to get together as a group. I started to incorporate some of those into the story.

Then I took another step back and started prying the story loose from both the dream-source and real-life recollections, creating characters who weren’t us but had their own back stories. Add in some new touches of weirdness culminating in a scene of resurrection, and it finally felt like a story. You can read the resulting piece, “Reunion,” in Cleaver #47. I won’t tell you which of the other bits are real and which are made up, because honestly, what difference does it make? 

A story is like an origami: the art isn’t in the paper, it’s in the folds.

David L. Updike’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Journal, Philadelphia Stories, Hobart, Daily Science Fiction, 365 Tomorrows, Journ-E: The Journal of Imaginative Literature, and the anthologies Summer of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Vol. 2, Flash of the Dead, and The Dancing Plague: A Collection of Utter Speculation. He lives in Philadelphia, where he runs the publications program at an art museum.

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