Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind
Updated: Aug 24
I picked this up from Unabridged Bookstore on my most recent trip to Chicago. I was looking for something small to read on the way home. This fit the bill in both size and price—just over 100 pages and on sale for $5.99. I mostly know N. Scott Momaday as a prominent commentator in the indispensable Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo, the companion book to Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, The American Buffalo. As it happens, the term “blood memory” came into wider use after it appeared in Momaday’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn, considered a breakthrough in Native American literature. So, tangential connections abound, but this is my first exposure to Momaday’s work directly.
In the preface, Momaday writes, “We imagine and we dream, and we translate our dreams into language. This book is an enactment of that creative process. It is a celebration of words for their own sake.” Composed of 100 (mostly) prose poems, Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind is exactly what you’d expect given both title and preface. These “furnishings of the mind,” as Momaday calls them, draw on Native American oral storytelling traditions, and it’s easy to imagine hearing them around a campfire or as bedtime stories. Here there are sketches and vignettes, parables and allegories—some little more than the faint outline left after a vivid dream begins to fade upon waking, others deeply resonant, their meaning unfolding in layers over multiple readings. All of them share a true sense of wonder, of the power of images, of the interpretive mind, of the surprise and joy that comes from being able to turn such imaginings into words—written or spoken.
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