Lit/Pub #IV - The Wake Up Issue - Spring2024
The magazine of Professor Andrea di Robilant literary class at The American University of Rome. "Last year’s issue of Lit/Pub was about the slow return to a post-Covid world. This year, the initial theme was dreams – time to get on with it and think about the future. But the more we discussed what to put in the issue, the more it became apparent that a lingering wariness was still in the air, even a certain complacency. Hence the exhortatory title – The Wake Up Issue – which Isabella Klepikoff has deftly captured in the design of this year’s cover: a wolf resting by a Roman fountain. He looks to be resting, but his lively green eyes tell us he is stirring back to action."
The magazine of Professor Andrea di Robilant literary class at The American University of Rome.
"Last year’s issue of Lit/Pub was about the slow return to a post-Covid world. This year, the initial theme was dreams – time to get on with it and think about the future. But the more we discussed what to put in the issue, the more it became apparent that a lingering wariness was still in the air, even a certain complacency. Hence the exhortatory title – The Wake Up Issue – which Isabella Klepikoff has deftly captured in the design of this year’s cover: a wolf resting by a Roman fountain. He looks to be resting, but his lively green eyes tell us he is stirring back to action."
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Prose<br />
<strong>The</strong> Infinite Boredom of a Dreamless Night<br />
By Liliana Zimberg<br />
I don’t dream. I don’t, I can’t, I won’t…<br />
A natural process can’t be forced.<br />
But I like to hear about other people's dreams. <strong>The</strong>y can sound very pleasant! Of course sometimes<br />
they don’t make any sense to me and sometimes they are frankly boring.<br />
My friends will tell me when I appear in their dreams, and it feels strange. At times I wish they<br />
wouldn't but then I’m always eager to hear every detail. It’s like when a friend tells you about your<br />
drunken behavior during a night you can’t remember.<br />
I want to know how I behave in other people’s dreams – “What did I say?” I ask. “What was<br />
I wearing?” – and I cling to their descriptions in the hope of seeing something about me that I recognize.<br />
But then they tell me things like: “I had a dream about you and you were insulting me.” In one<br />
dream I was a terrorist. In another dream I put a bomb in a children’s hospital – I was told a little too<br />
casually about that for my liking. Sometimes I am just there, hanging out in someone else’s dream. A<br />
friend in highschool once said to me, “I dreamt about you, you were wearing a red hoodie.” And that<br />
was it. Does any of this mean anything? I have to think it doesn’t, or where would I be?<br />
In any case, I choose not to be offended. After all, dreams are the product of the unconscious<br />
mind. <strong>The</strong>y say the brain mashes up the events of the day while digesting emotions and stress, and<br />
then the dream director puts together a private little show for no one else but the dreamer, who also<br />
gets to interpret the dream. Sounds like fun. Though I wonder what it’s like to have people from one’s<br />
everyday life cast as actors in one’s dreams, and then having to face them in the morning. I pray they<br />
don’t think too much about my spotty appearances.<br />
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