“Tell a dream, lose a reader”? Nobody told us.  

In these dreams, friends of Kismet—from Jeff Tweedy to Stephanie Wambugu, Michelle Tea to Anahid Nersessian—show us that certain dreams should be told, written, and even read. 

They’re about lost children and cats, parents and dressmaker aliens. Many of them, in their different ways, raise the same question: Might dreams be visitations? Others are simply very funny.

Ariana Reines,
poet

The week my mother died, an uncle of mine dreamed of her. The Kabbalists say one must pay close attention to one’s dreams during the time surrounding the death of a loved one. My uncle had not seen my mother in more than thirty years. He told me that in the dream he was taking a walk, when suddenly he saw my mother, living quietly under an overpass. Immediately he made the decision to abandon his life, and live with my mother under the overpass. The two were happy together. End of Dream.

This is a dream that I treasure, especially because it was not my own. My mother was abandoned by almost everyone in our family, though my younger brother and I did our best to protect and care for her as her life unraveled. After her suicide, I found myself yearning to hear from people who had known her in happier times—any memory or shred of kind feeling toward her eased my heart. Some of her closest kin refused to come to her funeral, but poets and artists and long-lost relatives and friends showed startling warmth to her memory. My uncle’s dream reminded me almost of a Zen poem in its startling simplicity. I feel a sweetness in my heart, visualizing my uncle and mother living together happily under the overpass in his mind.

• • •

Jeff Tweedy,
musician

The recurring dream I have that has replaced not being prepared for a test in school is: I have dreamt many many many times that I don’t know any of my songs. I’m about to get on stage and I have forgotten all of the songs. Oh, and everybody’s mad at me. And I’m in my underwear.

• • •

Megan Nolan,
novelist

A recent dream. Me, my boyfriend, and his kids were trapped inside the Bronx Zoo after hours and my boyfriend suggested that to pass the time until morning we try to speak with/engage each animal and see what they would really like to be eating instead of whatever it is they currently receive. Most of the animals turned their backs on us in an almost haughty way, refusing to play ball, but the hippo, who seems a little morose, eventually confessed he had always wanted to try a “Meat Gyoza Sandwich”—the rest of the night we prepared this to the best of our ability, leaving the eventual sandwich in front of the hippo, now sleeping.

• • •

Jordan Kisner,
journalist

When I was in college I had a dream about a woman who was walking up and down mountains, trekking from one small alpine village to another. She was in her fifties maybe, graying but hale, and she was looking for her young adult daughter, who had disappeared one day without warning. Maybe the daughter had run away from home, maybe she had gone traveling and gotten lost. 

In each hand the woman carried sheaves of paper, which she scattered all over the streets of every village. Thousands and thousands of pieces of paper followed in her wake, so many that in the dream I was walking the steep cobblestoned streets and they were gathering around my ankles and blowing through the air. I picked one up and realized at once what the woman was up to. “Come home,” every paper said. “Here, in case you have forgotten, I have drawn you a map.” I followed the woman through the mountains as she threw reams of papers on the streets she hoped her daughter might be walking. “Come home, come home, come home.” 

• • •

Michelle Tea,
author

I dreamt I was at a sort of artists’ retreat. It was warm and sunny and green, and the people were cute and interesting. There was a man there, young and trans and very handsome. He was white, he had short, dark hair. Maybe he wasn’t wearing a shirt, because it was a summer day and he’d been working on his own art, which was sort of physical, building things, installations. I realized that he was interested in me and had a total internal meltdown—I was so excited, and immediately began with a, Keep it cool, don’t blow it, narrative in my mind. 

He had a tattoo of a single black dot in the middle of his chin. We were sitting beside each other on white, wooden chairs at a wooden table, and he leaned his face towards me and I understood he wanted to put his chin in my mouth. I wasn’t really sure what that would be like—what it meant, was it sexy, did I want it? But, I was open, and I wanted to be close to him and see what could be conjured between us. I opened my mouth and took his chin into it. It was strange—awkward, sort of sloppy. Then he pulled his face away. I felt I needed to know if that had meant anything—like, was that sex?—because I had to tell my husband about it, just to let him know what was going on, and it seemed best to not bring him something ambiguous.

• • •

Arielle Angel,
Editor-in-Chief of Jewish Currents

This is the first dream I had about my father after he killed himself: We were in Vegas as a family—my siblings and I and my mom and dad, divorced but more amicable than in life. My dad had been preparing a stand-up set, talking a big game. No he’d never done it before, but what did that matter? He knew how it was done. He was full of ideas, like he always was when he was manic. We were in an enormous theater in one of the hotels and he somehow made it up on stage in front of thousands, a stack of typed pages in his hand—his jokes. The lights were up in the house as if the show had already ended, but people were still there, waiting for something. He talked about how glad he was to be there, to be on this trip with his family, to be in front of this audience. And then he just sort of froze. I was standing close to the back with my siblings but I ran to the front row. I began screaming at him—not so much with encouragement, more with panic and exasperation. “Come on, Dad! Say something! Just read what’s on the page!” But it was too late. He had lost his nerve; there were no jokes on the page worth telling.

• • •

Stephanie Wambugu,
author of Lonely Crowds

I ran into an old friend in a place that looked like one of the courtyards within high school campuses in Los Angeles. She is a friend I loved very much and have not spoken to in years. For whatever reason I’ve been unable to reconcile with her, either because I can’t or don’t want to. In the dream she wore a wedding band though as far as I know she isn’t married in waking life. She walked up to me and told me about her life, the job she had in Hollywood (the neighborhood, not the industry), and the man she had married. Finally, she congratulated me on the publication of my novel and told me that she wished me well. I looked at her and asked, “Are you wearing my shirt?”

• • •

Yasmin Zaher,
author of The Coin

I’m sick and had a fever all night. My body was an archeological excavation, like a very old structure, and the boundaries and walls of it were delineated by my body turning very hot and then very cold. Weird and hellish.

• • •

Genevieve Goffman,
artist

Once, in real life, I spent three horrible months convinced my cat had been eaten by a coyote. My friend promised to watch her while I was traveling; she left her door open, and my cat ran away. One day she simply reappeared, uneaten, on the porch, offering no explanation of where she had been.

I dream the most about losing my cat. Her death is always predicated on some great inexplicable betrayal on my part, a failure to act, or a choice I don’t remember why I chose. In my dreams, she dies cradled in my arms. In my dreams, her death is, without any shadow of doubt, my fault.

• • •

Julian Lucas,
staff writer for The New Yorker

In the first dream I remember having, I stood up in my crib and toddled to the window. Huge, blood-red coins floated across the night sky. The presidents’ faces were twisted into lurid grimaces, telegraphing their cannibalistic intentions. General Washington winked at me, and I awoke with a scream.

• • •

Yasmine Seale,
poet and translator of Thousand and One Nights

I am in a vast American city, out in the street before dawn. A night out of Hopper. Then I am in the neon glow of a store, a kind of bodega, queuing to pay for something. In the queue ahead of me is A., who is checking out a book. This bodega sells cigarettes, milk etc and also lends books. A. turns and asks me to fill out my name on the form: he is taking out the book for me. At the top of the form, where it should say “NAME”, it says “Shahrazad”, then a dotted line for my name. I write my name and he gives me the book he has chosen for me. It is called IRONING IN AMERICA.

• • •

Biz Sherbert,
member of the Kismet Advisory Council

EX-BOYFRIEND.

• • •

Katie Peterson,
author of Fog and Smoke

In my dream, there was a secret word for light. Only a few people could use it, and if you used it, you needed to represent it with initials. One of the initials had to be “z” and the other would be a letter from your name chosen randomly. Even in spoken language, you couldn’t refer to light unless you had permission, and those with permission had to use the notation described – a “z” and then a letter from your name. In the world we were living in, those who could say or write “light” in this way began to behave badly, exaggerating their own importance, saying and writing “light” in this way (az, bz, cz) as much as they could, to point out to the others their ability and permission to do so. But we were in a room together – my beloved and I, and we couldn’t say light. The room had wallpaper with a pattern of vines, but the roses were growing down like a living wall, or trellises, and it gave a feeling of confinement, and I said, “did spring happen while I was sick, all of it?” But I wasn’t afraid, because we were together.

• • •

Greta Morgan,
author of The Lost Voice

In a glittering metropolis, I am parallel parking my horse. Its hooves click-clack on the asphalt amidst all the beeps and traffic sounds. I ease it between two sleek cars, the reins soft in my hands. I dismount to pay the meter. No one on the street finds this strange.

• • •

Ross Simonini,
writer and artist

One of my first memories is of an experience I refer to as a dream because I have no other language to describe it. When I was probably 4 I had a recurring  and seemingly waking experience in which I was visited by a team of beings. I say team because whatever relationship they had to each other was like players engaged in some serious and revenant game. At that time I interpreted them as superheroes (humanoid, flying, odd clothes) but looking back, I think comic books were simply the mythic framework I was using to interpret my experience. From a different perspective, one could call them aliens, ghosts, angels, kobolds, jinn, or fairies. They were things I could not explain and I gave them a form that suited me. 

During each of my encounters, the beings came through my window and lifted me out of the room and into the sky where we would fly to a place I remember only through my nervous system: a bright white ecstatic reality where all the physical senses are washed out, like how heaven is often depicted in films. Afterwards, I woke up in a different place than I fell asleep  —my parent’s bed, the couch, the floor—with a distinct memory of being deposited there by my friends. The whole experience felt clearly real, and still seems far more vivid than other memories from that time.

• • •

Marisa Meltzer,
author of It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin

My childhood crush was River Phoenix and I had a dream he was in love with me and kissing me. I woke up and tried so hard to go back to sleep and keep it going. He died soon after.

• • •

Elle Nash,
author of Deliver Me

I dreamed I was a visitor to a city made of beige, old buildings, though the details now are murky and I mostly remember the color and the feeling. The sun was hot and washed everything in a yellow hue. A big crowd ushered me down a street, and there was great excitement for a very important guest that was arriving. As I got there, in the center of town was a craggy boulder barely taller than the crowd. A slug the size of my hand began to climb it, leaving a sparkling trail behind. The crowd cheerfully chanted its name with more and more fervor as it reached the top. I remember thinking, what are they saying? They were shouting, “Milne! Milne! The slug that everybody loves!”

• • •

Anahid Nersessian,
critic and academic

Last night I had a dream that I went to a baseball game with Susan Sarandon.

• • •

Cass McCombs,
musician

War in the jungle. The severed head of the enemy leader is kept in a room in a command base shack while surrender is negotiated. The head is still alive. A coup is organized; they plan to fly the enemy leader’s head to the capital where it can lead again. Commandos surround the shack, wading in the swamp. Shack is lifted by a helicopter. Staff sergeant disobeys order from captain. Coup has begun.

• • •

Cristine Brache,
poet and artist

Aliens in my dream last night, with a weird cult-like feel to it. They looked human. I had a baby.

I needed to fulfill some prerequisite to go to their planet. There was a dress store on earth where they based their operations from. Only the women-like aliens worked there. One was sitting in a corner; she’d monotonically recite this preamble about why she sold dresses. She looked like Edie Sedgwick. I had to buy a different colored dress for each day of the ceremony I needed to attend. I was scared of not being accepted by them. When the time came to go, they told me my baby wasn’t real (they inspected it). I began to cry. I wanted my child to be real. When they gave it back to me, it was just a doll. It looked like it was in a placenta made of fabric. Light emanated through the fabric sack in the same way it emanates from the Care Bears sheet that hangs from my window when the sun hits it.

• • •

Matthew J. Donovan,
writer and researcher

I dreamt of my mother again, after years of her illness and absence, but this time, we weren’t wandering through the empty spaces of life or the fading barely-memories. We were in a place that felt between—neither the living nor the dead. The light was overcoming me, soft as a half-forgotten promise, and she was fully herself again, in a way I hadn’t seen in years. Her hair thick again, her smile not burdened by the weight of what she’d lost.

We stood together, waiting—not for anything in particular—but for something beyond us, something I couldn’t touch. I reached out to her, unsure she would remember me, but she did. And in that moment, I knew: this place, this moment, was all we were allowed to have. Love wasn’t something we possessed there; it was simply what we were. It wasn’t the death I feared, but the quiet understanding that everything we thought we were—everything we ever loved—was merely an unfolding.

• • •

Sheon Han,
writer

Things that happen on silent retreats.

Day six of ten, somewhere in the mountainous folds of Jinan County, South Korea. After lunch, I stood in the yard watching green oriental grasshoppers—the slim, wingless, long-legged kind—leap through the still air in high arcs.

Then the bell rang for the afternoon sitting. As silence settled over the meditation hall, I slipped into a dream state.

I was back in the yard, kneeling beside a grasshopper. A factoid I’d once read—and found somewhat spurious—surfaced in my mind: that at any given moment, we are all breathing molecules from Caesar’s last breath, now evenly dispersed throughout the atmosphere. Perhaps the grasshopper and I were inhaling them. Bits of his decomposed body might well have made their way into us.

The grasshopper’s shape then morphed into a living Ishihara plate—the test for color blindness—its body an assemblage of colored dots, representing its constituent molecules. I glanced down at myself. Same dots. Same palette. The two of us were, as they say, just cosmic dust, rearranged into slots ordained by different genetic blueprints.

For a moment, it felt as axiomatic as x + y = y + x: the grasshopper and I—Caesar, too—were but transient configurations of the same atomic pool.

• • •

Chris Gabriel,
writer and creator of MemeAnalysis

I was in a Roman town, there were in-ground baths. I looked beyond them to a building, outside of it there was a woman in a white and red robe sitting over a small table with a basin on it. I went to her, the basin had a few inches of water, in it, there was a plate. She touched it and it grew to twice its size, she then put a key on it.

• • •

Will Chancellor,
author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

A vast collection field, a sunken salt flat with raised banks, like a taro farm that’s lost its water supply and is now a grid of drought. A hundred or so of us there. Captured in defeat. Critically parched. Under tower lights so piercing that we squint in the early night and shield our eyes. One veteran paces among us. He tells us that this was not real fighting. We had found no war….There’s massacre in him. He reminds me of a mule deer, speaks from the neck. He paces until the words are all out and all that’s left is disgust. Then, he rummages through sack cloth and finds something. Holding a shotgun aloft in his right hand, he dives head-first through the ground. He enters the ground. And the instant his boots break through the surface, everyone vanishes and I am alone. I realize that what I thought was solid earth was no more than a thin rind. I look around the night, and dive into the ground myself…The water brings an aesthetic joy…I am consciously surprised that I am feeling beauty in this hidden aquifer. I drink, calmly, and glide to the bank. I walk into the night, free as a ghost.

• • •

Noah Warren,
poet

I could feel the muscles of my wings as I was flying over to Canada.

• • •

Lisa Marchiano,
co-host of This Jungian Life

I’ve been keeping my cat Misty in a basement or garage. Johanna, the old woman from downstairs, had been looking in on her for a weekend while I was away. I didn’t take her out of the basement right away once I got back, and Johanna kept looking in on her, even after I told her I was back and didn’t need her to do so anymore. Johanna started leaving me notes and nagging me to attend to something in the basement that would make it better for Misty. And then, even though I had already paid her for the weekend, she sent me a letter with an itemized invoice for $8,000! The tone of the letter was a bit angry. She explained that she had spent $12 on cat toys and that she had also taken Misty out for a nice lunch at a restaurant that had cost $80. By far the largest item on the bill was something she called “cat talk”—her efforts to communicate with Misty. For this, she charged me $20,000! I was furious.

• • •

Eliza McLamb,
musician

From my journal in 2023:

Woke up from a dream where my dad took me back into the past and I saw my mother at my age and I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. Also in this dream I worked at Pizza Hut and the manager gave me basil oil as a gift and at the end of his shift he made a big egg, like it was a fancy restaurant. I didn’t do hardly any work at the Pizza Hut but no one seemed to mind and that made me feel kind of worse.

• • •

Phoebe Quirk,
Architect, Kismet True Believer

I’m on a tram in Melbourne, flying down the street at high speed. The tram is packed, there’s no room to move, yet here comes the tram conductor selling tickets, weaving through the throng. I recognize him immediately: it’s Wesley Snipes. I gradually become aware that the tram is out of control and only he can save us…

• • •

Aaron Robertson,
author of The Black Utopians

My grandmother, my Nana, stood in the center of a basement. It was the huge multipurpose room of my childhood church, where parishioners usually gathered for meals after Sunday service or used one of its curtained alcoves for Bible classes. There was a spotlight on my Nana, coming from nowhere, and she was dressed in some kind of child’s frock. The rest of the room was grimy black. This woman, reserved but jovial in reality, was shorter here than she should have been. She stared at me, scowling, and held a bouquet of balloons in her hand. I thought this woman who looked like my grandmother was malevolent, but as my terror grew, I began to understand that she was only sad. David Lynch couldn’t have done it better. I hadn’t seen Eraserhead yet. The only thing I would remember from that movie is the Lady in the Radiator singing: In Heaven, everything is fine…

• • •

Natalie Dunn,
poet and fiction writer

I dreamt that my friend and I went to Madonna’s house for a dance party but we couldn’t find her and kept running through these rooms in her house laughing hysterically.

• • •

Ada Lea,
musician

When I finally found him, I knew something was off. I inspected his penis and of course it was chafed from overuse. Three people in only one week, he admitted. No apology, either. The relationship was over. The penis was barely attached. It just dangled. I threaded my needle and sewed it back together, then left.