The dreams were a torrent of material; Poetself could barely keep up. I wrote of and from them incessantly in notebooks I carried with me everywhere – to the coffee shop down the street on the tiny strip, to the couch on the Dream Factory’s rickety front porch, to the laundromat, at the desk that took up most of my apartment.

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I return to those dreams in these notebooks now – I take them up, my notebooks – their grand aspirations and late-night confessions, their fragments and confusions, their early drafts of poems, enumerations of sights and sounds, slights and victories, Poetself’s inner dialogues, progress and struggles – and in so doing, I take myself up, as the main character in our other poetry professor Fred Chappell’s novel It Is Time, Lord exhorted his flock (and himself, ultimately) to do. And also in so doing, I solve the mystery of a poem I’d sent my mother during my second semester in the Program – a poem, based on one of these strange dreams, that began haunting me when I found it among her things after she died suddenly last year. I knew it had haunted and confused her, like everything else I was doing in my life after I decided to become an artist, and I thought maybe that if I could take this up, I could tell her I figured it out, Mom – I understand what it means, even if it’s too late now.

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