With another girl (Jean Rankin, my childhood friend) I come to the edge of the sea. (We are about eleven and twelve years old.) There seem to be shelves, or levels, of sea, and the whole expanse is cluttered with wrecked tankers, some floating, some half-beached, as far as the eye can see. It's a dank, dark-green, eerie seascape but the water's not cold and we have come to swim. We swim aboard the decks of the nearest wreck--stanchions and bits of companionway all awash and covered with eely seaweeds. We have fun swimming in and out of it all; we don't scrape or hit against anything. There is absolutely no living creature in sight and the shore is a vague sedgy marsh.

After a long time, though, we realize that the boat is free of the bottom (and of the ridges or reefs of dark tufa-like rock) and has drifted out with the tide. We become troubled and decide to make our way (wading along the half-submerged decks to the end nearest land) back as far as we can without swimming, and then swim to shore before we get carried out any further. But even then it looks like a long swim--can we make it?

Jean thinks we must; I am hesitant, thinking it might be better to risk staying on board the many hours till the next high tide washes us inshore again. We are perplexed--especially since it's so hard to judge the distance and the variable depth. Looking out to sea, the other levels stretch away and away, faintly gleaming, thick with wrecks. We might get wedged so that out particular wreck would not wash in with the next tide--or, half submerged as it was, it might sink, further out than we were already. On the other hand, the distance we were already out at sea looked greater than any we had ever tried to swim. No one to whom to signal.

Woke in perplexity.

EDITOR'S COMMENT

At the end of a long essay on the literary uses of dreams, Levertov recounts this one as a dream too detailed and narrative for her sort of poetry, but perhaps suited for a story, if she wrote stories, and if it had an ending.

But the ending here is necessarily some waking action! The dream warns of a life-and-death decision the dreamer must make, and quickly. It lays out the risks--acting now demands more sustained effort than any in her life; waiting might improve her chances, but could easily make things even worse.

What is that choice? Levertov won't say. Does she know, but hide it as irrelevant? Or does she not know herself? (Hmm, that last sentence was an ambiguous insinuation, but both readings fit, so let it stand.) Her essay has not one word on its life-context; we're not even told if it's from childhood, or an adult dream that she was a child again. Stripped naked like this, the dream's uninterpretable, and looks incomplete--but is it? It lobs the ball into the waking Levertov's court. Did she grasp what the crisis was? Did she act? If so, how? The resolution, if any, lies in the waking world--of action.

In short, the reason Levertov let this stand as a frustrating fragment is that to finish she'd need to reveal personal matters she's either unwilling to bare, or unaware of herself.

I've done this too, and suspect it's common among artists who exploit dreams for their art. But with a dream this vivid and pointed, it's dishonest to claim it's not complete--if we'd just admit that embarrassing pickle we got into. Even if you can't see what your dilemma is, as in Kjartan Arnorsson's 'Dream?', admitting that contrast between waking comfort and dream crisis means something can lead both to esthetic completion and needed life-changes.

SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.1, no.2, summer 1980) p.141). Passage untitled; I added "The Wreck" to aid searches only.

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