One night I fall asleep wondering why I had so few friends as a child. In my dream I’m a child again, alone at the playground, all the other children playing happily together as I watch. One by one they leave for home until I’m the only one left in the park. A lovely young woman arrives; she’s in a horse-driven chariot. She tells me she couldn’t come until all the other children had gone. Would I like to see a show? I nod yes and she invites me into the chariot. It isn’t a long ride. She stops in front of a tent, like the kind you see at carnivals. I go inside. It’s a puppet show and the woman’s father is the puppeteer. How can I describe what I see? The tent is a world, so overbrimming with wondrous things that even thinking about it makes me awestruck all over again.

(I hadn’t known that the Muse has been cultivating me since childhood and I’m astonished.)

My sisters and I are young children, holidaying in a small picturesque English village. It’s a bright summer’s day. The village skims a calm river. We meet a lovely woman as we play by the river—she’s a professor and she has a small holiday home in the village. She shares the home with her lover, a famous painter. The have a pretty motor boat and take us on a ride down the river. The woman shows us her lover’s paintings: river landscapes, beautiful and calm.

(The Muse again, her lover art.)

And then this dream: I’m at a seaside town, alone, walking on the crowded pier. I pass a small passenger boat with a strange man aboard. The man wants me to get on the boat—he’ll take me on a cruise—on the boat I see canvases of oil paintings propped against the cabin wall. The man says his friend is an artist—the paintings are his and I should come aboard to have a closer look. Intrigued, I do. The artist comes out of the small cabin; he’s also the captain. There’s an intense, immediate sexual attraction between us. He tells me that more of his paintings are inside the cabin. His paintings are portraits of rugged men who work at the harbor. One is a self-portrait, the artist shirtless, working as one of the seaside laborers. The artist’s works are intense and edgy, his colors grays and blues—not the kind of art I usually like, but I like his work very much. In small talk, I tell him that I’m a big fan of A (in the dream I know his name—the famous artist in my other dream, the muse’s lover). The artist says he too is a fan. The boat begins to move, and we’re sitting outside in the open. As the boat moves, the sea grows in size, the color more intensely blue. The artist and I both say we’ve never seen the sea so beautiful. Above our heads, I think I see the moon, large, only it looks more like the earth. He says it’s a planet and not the moon at all. The planet flies by and then the moon rises, so clean and large we can see every nook and cranny of her face. I can hardly breathe, hardly see, the atmosphere too vibrant, too electrified by sexual tension. The boat’s back at the pier. The artist is standing on the boat, me on the pier. He looks at me, waiting.

When I wake, I realize who he is. Three dreams of art, beginning, development, fruition. Voyages.

[These days, inspiration has no sticking power.]



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J.A. Pak’s work has been published in BHP, Litro, Lunch Ticket, Joyland, Queen Mob’s Tea House, etc. Come and visit her at Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness.

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