Written by Tessa Yang
Our Dreams issue, 57.1, is going to land on your doorsteps any day now. Here, Tessa Yang tells us a bit about what inspired her story, “What Do You Dream?”
We’ve included a sneak peak below!
I’ve written a number of stories and poems about sleep: sleeping too much, sleeping too little, sleepwalking, dreaming, etc. I find myself drawn to sleep as one of these fascinating liminal states between real and not real. So this story, “What Do You Dream?” fits in generally with that theme I’ve been exploring for a few years. It also had a very specific source of inspiration: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which I read for the first time last year. That book has a number of wonderful dream sequences, but the one that really intrigued me was when the narrator’s grandmother, Naseem, is described as being so invasive she can see into her daughter’s dreams.
When I actually sat down to start drafting the story a few months later, it immediately became about this couple, Marla and Neil. I think the central questions of the story are how much you can really know about another person, and how much you want to know. When you’re in any sort of meaningful relationship, there’s pressure to be completely open and honest. But there’s also value in secrets, in privacy. Dreams, to me, express some of our deepest fears and desires, so to be able to experience someone else’s dreams is a drastic breach in privacy. Neil just doesn’t understand this.
The biggest difference between the first and final draft was the ending. Initially, Neil was by himself after an awkward date. He was in an arcade for some reason? I’m not sure. The scene just fell totally flat. I think I allowed him to be too content. Also, his date didn’t have any dialogue, which annoyed me when I read through it again. I try to avoid putting someone in a scene and then not letting them speak. So I rewrote it. Now Neil’s date has a voice. She gets to be a little bit snarky with him, which is deserved, since he spends the whole time talking about his ex. And Neil is in a much more uncertain place by the time the story ends.
An Excerpt from “What Do You Dream?”
“I teach my students that dreaming is a process of memory consolidation,” he says as the waiter appears with their entrees. “Or else it’s just an epiphenomenon to sleep. A random response to the electrical activity of the cortex. But the way I’ve been dreaming lately—it’s hard not to feel like it’s something much bigger than all that. Like I’m receiving messages. Like I’ve been chosen. You probably think I’m totally crazy.”
The dog-breeder cuts into her steak and offers him a weak smile that says yes, she thinks he’s totally crazy. “Last week I had a dream two of my dogs got out,” she says. “I crossed oceans looking for them, but it turned out they were in my old piano teacher’s house the whole time. I think I have the ability to will happy endings out of my dreams, to circumvent the truly awful situations.” She gives him a significant look, and Neil, if he had been listening, may have wondered whether he were being labelled an Awful Situation to circumvent, or one out of which she might yet wring a forcibly happy ending.
But he’s not listening. He is thinking of Marla with a belated sorrow that floods him so suddenly, he wishes only to slip beneath the tablecloth and curl in a ball on the floor. Marla’s purses. Marla’s hair. Marla’s half-assed makeup. Marla’s palm full of marbles, their cream-and-peppermint swirls, how a boyish longing had risen within him to take those tiny, precious orbs to a steep place and scatter them down the incline.
Tessa Yang received her MFA from Indiana University where she served as the Editor of Indiana Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly, Joyland, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Earlham College in Indiana and is currently at work on a novel and a story collection, which includes, “What Do You Dream?”