Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind

By N. Scott Momaday

“[Momaday] must be ranked among the greatest of our contemporary writers.”—American Scholar

"Momaday’s poems are rich with description, lush with dreaming, and filled with magic." — Library Journal (starred review)

From Pulitzer Prize winner and revered literary master N. Scott Momaday, a beautiful and enchanting new poetry collection, at once a celebration of language, imagination, and the human spirit.

“Language and the imagination work hand in hand, and together they enable us to reveal us to ourselves in story. That is indeed a magical process. . . . We imagine and we dream, and we translate our dreams into language.” —from the Preface

A singular voice in American letters, Momaday’s love of language and storytelling are on full display in this brilliant new collection comprising one hundred sketches or “dream drawings”—furnishings of the mind—as he calls them. Influenced by his Native American heritage and its oral storytelling traditions, here are prose poems about nature, animals, warriors, and hunters, as well as meditations that explore themes of love, loss, time, and memory. Each piece, full of wisdom and wonder, showcases Momaday’s extraordinary lyrical talent, the breadth of his imagination, and the transformative power of his writing. Dream Drawings is also illustrated with a selection of black-and-white paintings by Momaday that capture the spirit of his prose.

Poignant, inspired, and timeless, this is a collection that will nourish the soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063218123

N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024) is an internationally renowned poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller. He authored numerous works that include poetry, novels, essays, plays, and children’s stories. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel House Made of Dawn and was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A longtime professor of English and American literature, Momaday earned his PhD from Stanford University and retired as Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. In 2022, he was inducted into the inducted into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. 

Book preview

The Original Storyteller

I could tell you a story.

I could tell you a story without words.

I could look you a story in the eyes.

You would understand the story,

Or you would feel more than understand the story.

It would be the story of my life.

It would be a story within a story.

The story would contain only interesting things.

It would not be less than a whole story.

You would hear the story in my silence.

The story would make you laugh and cry.

Well then, I would tell you a story.

On Dreaming

From this reality my words become,

And I am left to calculate the sum

Of meaning. Rather would I gather dreams

And find in dreaming more than meaning seems.

Centaur

The boy caught sight of the animal as it grazed in a cover of grasses. It was a bright morning in the story of time. It might have been yesterday or thousands of years ago. The boy caught his breath. Never had he seen, or even dreamed, of such a creature. Latent, it seemed a work of art, a statue or a painting on a cave wall, perhaps. It was equal to the far reach of the boy’s wonder. The boy shouted in pure delight, and the animal erupted in motion. It ran at great speed, and the strength that informed its whole body was under perfect control. Light rippled on its flanks, its blue-black hooves struck like rapid drumbeats on the earth, and its chiseled head lunged like the point of a spear into the crystal air. Tears came to the boy’s eyes, and in his mind there came a conviction that he could barely express: We belong to each other, this creature and I.

To Hold the Sun

An old man of no use walked in the plain. He was lost in his mind. He caught a splinter of the sun and held it in his hands. He had forgotten, but at that moment he remembered, who he was.

The Scop

My imagination turns upon words. I am certain that I was there in the forest when a storyteller recited Beowulf to a gathering of villagers in Anglo-Saxon England, common folk for whom such a performance was magical. And I have heard the thunder of King Lear’s voice on the boards of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London. I was spellbound. Emily Dickinson read to me a poem she had written about crickets in which she realized a precision of statement that defies description. Czeslaw Milosz read his magnificent Esse to an audience in Ohio. I was there. I know these voices as well as I know my own, for I have heard them in my dreams. Dreams are the language of the imagination, and words are the conceptual symbols of our dreams. The scop, the actor, the writer, the storyteller draw with words. All of human history and all that can be dreamed of the future is contained in such drawings. I hear ancient voices striving for meaning and art, and I see crude and beautiful images on the walls of caves. Deo gratias.

The Spiritual Gravity of Place

There are places in the world that lay claim to you, though you have been to them only once or not at all. They are places that you know imperfectly in your recollection or unaccountably in your dreams. Once, I visited the ancient city of Samarkand. I was there a few days, but it seems to me that I lived there throughout some years of my life. There I stepped out of time and into the vortex of cellular memory. Samarkand absorbed my whole being. And in my dreams I have come to Tintagel, or rather the mythic city of Camelot, which holds for me the same spiritual gravity. I have been there, though I have not, and there I have heard someone say, Ah, you have returned. Welcome!

The Realization of Nothing

At Brocéliande I joined a group of sightseers at Merlin’s tomb. Their guide was a portly man of average aspect who looked to be in his fifties or sixties. His eyebrows and beard were white, and there was an air of sagacity about him. He proclaimed himself a Druid, and he spoke of Merlin with great authority. He held easily and securely the attention of his audience. There was something unusual about him. I felt that he existed in a separate age, a dimension of experience quite apart from my own. When he finished his remarks I approached him, told him that I had never met a Druid, and asked him if I might take his picture. He very kindly agreed. But when I held the camera to my eye I could not find him in the viewfinder. Nevertheless I snapped the shutter. Later, when I had the film developed, that was the only exposure on which there was no image at all. There was the