Night Flights

Every night, without effort or intention, we are sent messages. From the deepest Self, from the unconscious, from whatever name you give to the intelligence that moves beneath waking life. Most of us wake and let them dissolve — chasing the day's answers in the day's noise, never knowing that the answers arrived hours earlier, wrapped in image and symbol and the strange grammar of sleep. Night Flights is an invitation to read the postcards.I n this second book from poet and psychotherapist Valerie Johns, dreams become the primary text — not metaphor, not decoration, but direct transmission from the psyche. Each poem arises from an actual dream: massive serpents and tiny hidden birds, beloved horses who return to reassure, dead friends riding shotgun, the shadow self confronted and tended rather than fled. Guided by Jung, Buddhism, and Hindu mythology, and accompanied by the Vagabond Poet Samuel Beckett as a kind of Virgil through the underworld, Johns moves through terror and beauty, aging and eros, grief and the stubborn return of joy — and brings back, each morning, what the night had to say.Where her debut memoir Ashes in the Milk was the descent into childhood and adult trauma — the finding of language for wounds that arrived before language existed — Night Flights is what becomes possible on the other side. Not consolation. Not resolution. Something more alive than either: the luxurious knowing of the deepest Self without fear.For anyone who goes to sleep at night.