"A Dream" by J.J. Nelson

J.J. Nelson's "A Dream" is about a man struggling to find meaning in his life. He dreams of his life before some undisclosed event, and also dreams of drowning. His life, he finds, is going no where and that dissatisfies him. The conflict in Gabriel's life is internal; he doesn't know how to interact with the people he is surrounded by or express himself. He doesn't relate to the younger college generation.

 I thought the imagery was done very well. In the opening dream, it was easy to see the scenes play out over the dark water, and it was easy to tell these were visions and not entirely separated from the situation. The description of the gravity bong was also very good -- I could see what was happening and what it looked like though I have no experience with it. I thought that keeping the characters of Win and Tori as flat as they were was also a strong point in the story. It helped establish a "Me v. Them" theme for the reader and also was a good illustration of how the narrator did not relate to either of them on any level but the physical high.

Reading this, I wanted to know what had happened two years before that had such a profound effect on Gabriel. There's so much build up on it, but we never get to see what it is, and it leaves the reader unsatisfied. I thought, with the flashback at the end, that you would expand on what was so awful that Gabriel was still affected by it, but the big reveal never came. The reveal would also, I believe, benefit from the reader understanding more about the mysterious girl that Gabriel thinks about enough to motivate him to write again, after being in a creative slump. Who was she in relation to him? How did he lose her? These questions were posed in my head, but I never received an explanation.