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If dream people were the world

we would inhabit a singular

consciousness that would

be pulled through one

inexplicable scenario

after another

like a goat upon a rope.

If dream people were the world

our lives and landscapes

would change beyond reason,

streets and buildings

in constant flux.

All those around us

would change in kind,

trading names and faces.

Directions to our shifting

destinations would be

tedious and ludicrous.

We would remain

lost between

event horizons: our

own altered histories

and future visions

that would never transpire.

If dream people were the world

there would be no time

for reflection.

We would never decipher

the language of our lives

despite the metaphoric clues

all around us.

We would never wake up

to realize

we were dreaming.




Bruce Boston is the author of forty-seven books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener's Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His writing has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. You can read more about him at www.bruceboston.com and see some of his previous work in our archives.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
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As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
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