One afternoon in 1952 for no apparent reason I fell asleep for a little while by a window in the front room of the house in an Essex seaside resort where I was living with my parents. It was winter and rain was beating against the glass. In my sleep, which was deep, I dreamed a poem.

In the dream it was night and there was a different house and rain at another window. There was no 'I' in the dream, only this other house and the rain and the glass, and a very strong sense that the dreamer was the rain and the glass, and all this coming as words and rhythms heard and felt, blindly, not as things seen. The essence of the dream was perhaps rhythm, but its substance came as words.

I was thirteen years old. It seemed to me that for a moment I had fallen awake. It was after this dream that I knew what I had to do for the rest of my life.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Not bad for thirteen. And it did double duty: both a good poem in its own right, and as proof the dream meant what it implied: this is your right work. Lots of us dream of odd jobs and talents, but we usually dismiss them when we wake. Nye couldn't; the dream made sure of it. He became a writer. This is the first poem in his Collected Works.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.183-4

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