I'm a Ukrainian-Jewish-American woman who is 34 years old. I'm a poet, mother, teacher, and academic. My immigrant story is that my family came from Odessa, Ukraine to Brooklyn, NY when I was 9 years old and we had refugee status. We'd been assimilated in many ways, but still very much keeping up the culture. My family and I talk exclusively in Russian (even my American husband and two-year-old daughter do!), and my mother has a Russian aesthetic center where we're trying to get Russo-phone … [Read More...] about As If Prompted by a Giant’s Hand
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Have your experiences as an immigrant
influenced your dreams?
Many psychologists, therapists, and healers say that a key function of dreaming is to help people navigate through big transitions in their lives. To immigrate from one country to another is definitely a transition of deep significance and long-lasting emotional impact. This makes it very likely that immigrants will have vivid dreams, both positive and negative, about the challenges they face in adapting to their new home, and mourning for their old home.
These dreams have the potential to illuminate collective issues of identity, loss, and survival that affect millions of other people who are also immigrants. I have begun working with Alisa Minyukova, an artist in New York, on a project to gather a large set of these dreams, explore their interweaving patterns, and then publicly share our findings in a variety of creative formats. We appreciate your help in spreading the word about the project!
Describe your dream Read MoreThe Never-Ending Bridge
Along with my earliest memories of life is a dream I will never forget, and one that has popped up in my thoughts throughout my life, and the memory of that dream is as vivid if not more so than my early waking memories. In this simple dream, I sit in the back of a car, my parents are in the front, and I gaze out in wonder as we cross over a magnificent bridge, akin to the Golden gate in San Francisco, but this bridge never seems to end. It crosses an infinite ocean of blue water sparkling in … [Read More...] about The Never-Ending Bridge