Dream Research
by Sue Reynolds
the year my son perched on the cusp
between grade eight and high school,
he graduated from sharing his thoughts
to single word responses
fine or sure
I worked in a sleep lab that summer
balancing his swimming lessons and day camp
with my own all-night endurance
one night he helped me stick electrodes
to the heads of the sleepers
then I bound him at the cerebral cortex,
hypothalamus and suprachiasmatic nerve
I tucked him into the unfamiliar bed
and plugged his wires into the sleep box
how are you? I asked
in the blue underwater light of the control room
I gazed into the computer screens
the way an aquarium visitor
peers at the unfettered flight
of aquatic creatures
he dove deep into slow theta
and I closed my eyes remembering
when he would roll over dreaming,
a seal pup in my belly,
the two of us umbilical connected
later he floated up into REM
the styli recording his dreams in frantic scribbles
like scribes in a marketplace
writing a language I could no longer translate
and when I opened my eyes
moments later I watched the dot
swimming across the graph
in search of open water
Susan Lynn Reynolds is a writer, teacher and psychotherapist. Her YA novel Strandia won the Canadian Library Association’s national Young Adult Novel of the Year award, and she is also a multiple winner of the Timothy Findley Creative Writing Prize for her short stories and poetry. She has been leading writing workshops for criminalized women at Central East Correctional Centre for 10 years and received the June Callwood Award for that program.