Submissions Editor at Dreams Quarterly

Dear Mr. Smith,

Thank you for submitting your “unique nocturnal reverie,” as you call it, to Dreams Quarterly.

While dreaming that your mother was performing spot-on impressions of Judi Dench is indeed an original detail as yet unregistered in our database, the rest of your dream—falling from a huge edifice that might be the Empire State Building or maybe a castle but you “can’t be sure”—is the kind of murky, pro-forma submission we get all the time, and it does not pass muster with our panel of peer reviewers. And yes, we had a hunch that you would wake up before you hit the ground.

We thank you for thinking of us and wish you well placing your dream elsewhere.

Donald Wembly
Submissions Editor
Dreams Quarterly
American Academy of Dreams

* * * 

Dear Mr. Smith,

The opening of your dream was riveting to many of us. No one in the office could recall a dream about being transformed into a duckbilled platypus in any of the literature, although some older members remember a rash of Howard the Duck appearances in the seventies. A search of our database confirmed the unique quality of the dream. Sadly, however, many of us lost interest when you started screaming, “It’s me! It’s me!” and no one could hear you. We heard you, and we cannot offer you a place our magazine for such a clichéd development. But we will enter it into our database, and encourage you to try again.

Your dreams are showing steady improvement.

Donald Wembly
Submissions Editor
Dreams Quarterly
American Academy of Dreams

* * * 

Dear Mr. Smith,

So, so close! We very much enjoyed the image of you performing “Singin’ in the Rain” amid a downpour of Skittles. Frankly, there is a disappointing lack of candy in most submissions. That this happened during your big presentation at work and in front of the boss you hate, however, is something with which we are very familiar, as is the jump cut to you having sex with your junior-high-school French teacher while conjugating the verb “conjugate.”

I myself had that exact dream when I was fifteen, except her name was Madame Prefontaine, not Madame Vega.

Again, perhaps it would help if you performed a keyword search in our Dream Index to see just how common your dreams are before submitting them. I must say, though, that you have mastered the opening sequence. Now, if you can just keep that inventiveness going a little longer, and avoid the common plot points and fogginess that afflict so many dreams, you will really have something.

All the best,

Donald Wembly
Submissions Editor
Dreams Quarterly
American Academy of Dreams

* * * 

Dear Mr. Smith!

I am thrilled to tell you that no one in the recorded history of dreams has ever transformed into a “thought leader.” This innovative, groundbreaking, trendsetting, pioneering term for being an innovator, a creator, a trendsetter, and a pioneer brought much laughter to the office, and we can’t thank you enough. We got a little worried when you told your parents that you were, in fact, a thought leader and they didn’t understand. But then when you addressed a barn full of baaing sheep dressed in business suits with sheep-drool-covered smartphones in their mouths, it was simply a sublime moment of resentment transference. The finale, where all the sheep are bleating, “It’s me! It’s me!” and you say, “Who cares? I’m a thought leader, goddam it!” and then a pack of sheepdogs bursts in to herd them away while you deliver a lushly diabolical laugh, was thoroughly cinematic. And we loved how you morphed a common identity trope into a revengeful power trip. Really first-rate.

So it gives me great pleasure to write that you have now achieved the stuff dreams are made of—inclusion in our next issue. Congratulations!

We await your next submission, you thought leader, you.

Don

Seth Kaufman is the author of “The King of Pain.”

Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli.