DREAM DRAWINGS

The iconic Kiowa writer offers an assemblage of parables, poems, vignettes, and a few stark drawings, with the thematic underpinning that all stories are part of a larger universal story.

Momaday (b. 1934), winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous lifetime achievement awards, is acclaimed for his work as a fiction writer, poet, and essayist, often blurring the boundaries among categories. In this follow-up to Earth Keeper, the author pretty much obliterates those categories, drawing deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. “I have heard the thunder of King Lear’s voice on the boards of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London,” he writes. “I was spellbound. Emily Dickinson read to me a poem she had written about crickets in which she realized a precision of statement that defies description.” Momaday suggests that if you have dreamed it, you have lived it, and that the you or I of whom you are conscious might itself be a dream. We see these ideas at work in “Dreaming Bear Speaks,” one of the many short narratives in which bears appear—usually not threatening, sometimes dreaming. “Perhaps he dreams of me dreaming of him,” writes the author. “He dreams of being me, of being human.” Night and day, dreams and awakening, fact and fantasy: The boundaries contained therein seem porous throughout these pieces, which combine elements of the fantastical and the matter-of-fact. Despite the title, there aren’t that many drawings, and they appear as representational inkblots, suggesting a tree or a crow or a human visage. The illustrations punctuate the narratives and underscore their thematic unity, but the narratives themselves also have a sketchlike quality—drawings with words. Momaday concludes that these pieces “are random and self-contained, and they are the stuff of story, and story is a nourishment of the soul.” Most spiritually open-minded readers will agree.

Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.