This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

 Safia Ismail /

"Strawberry Sweetheart"

Kayla
Myers /

Backyard Dreams

SAIC emerge journal · Kayla Myers - Backyard Dreams Reading With Music

I think about waking up most often when it comes to dreaming: the shock of being brought back to our waking world and leaving the dream.

Especially if the dream was one with warmth and comfort. I wonder, if, for a few moments, what would happen if we just sat in that warmth. Maybe it would seep into other parts of our lives. To our imaginations. To our futures.

Will you dream with me?



My backyard and my great-aunt’s swing don’t always appear in my dreams when I’m asleep. But it’s become a space in the waking hours where I feel grounded, yet weightless in the way you do when you’re falling in a dream. Not the kind of falling that jolts you awake, but the kind right before the jolt. The kind of falling where you’re suspended momentarily, free-floating in the space between the heavens and earth. The kind of falling that emanates warmth.

I used to sit on this swing every time we visited my great-aunt. She lived next door to my Grandma Mary. I imagined what I would be like when I grew up. I wondered what snack I’d have that day, and how my love for this place would shift as I did. When we moved the swing from her yard to ours, the loose thoughts I’d have on the swing would turn into questions as I thought more about what I wanted for myself, for all of us. Dreaming is one way of asking and answering.



I’ve always loved the feeling of being on a swing. The lift of my feet off the ground, the thought that maybe if I were brave enough I would leap off the swing and into the air.

I’ve never leapt off.

But, maybe now I can because you’re here.

Moving, leaping, dreaming while we’re awake. Can you feel the sun like I do?



My friend said a dream is a world of lessons and ideas where you aren’t the only one contributing. And now, with you being here, you have contributed to mine.

If dreams are a space to ask and answer, with no regard for the world outside, for the restrictions in that place, then, this is how I want us to move through the world. To commune, to build, to shift reality in the way of a dream.

This is about being active, remember? We’re working to actually leap off the swing I’ve never leapt off.



I’m not dreaming for the fantasy, the experience of it all, but so we can all have warmth and wonder wrapped around us always. I want to turn dreaming into a methodology that lives outside of the spaces in our minds.

I want to use it in an office, a classroom, a studio, in my backyard with the grass and the water surrounding it. I want to dream while listening to the water running, watching my dog explore, knowing that just across the way or next to us, there are others with spaces for dreaming like mine.



Now, let’s swing a little more, swing harder, faster, higher. We need to gain momentum until we have nowhere higher to go. Where we have no choice but to jump, to realize our dreams out in the world.

Swing, swing, swing with me. Feel this warmth, and let’s leap. Together.




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