Other Dreams

“You are about to read a rare and valuable gift to human understanding and to dream research. Other Dreams consists of several hundred dreams the author, an infantry medic in Vietnam, recorded from 2016 to 2017. Reading this book, may you be moved, troubled, informed, puzzled. May you benefit from reading the dreams of a man who served his country with honor during the Vietnam War, and has paid a steep price for it ever since.”
(from the Introduction)  G. William Domhoff, Ph.D Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor University of California, Santa Cruz Author, The Emergence of Dreaming

“Formally, the four hundred and sixty-three dreams recorded over the period of a year gathered here resemble prose poems for the way they are richly imaginative in their leaps, highly imagistic, and focused on presumably small moments. Marc Levy has tapped into a rich narrative vein in which he exposes the most personal details of one man’s life after the horrors of combat with such abstract precision as to force us to feel our way through the experiences; that’s poetry to me, and I am better for having read this book. Perhaps you will be too.”
     Bruce Weigl, author, Song of Napalm, Circle of Hanh

“A sequel to Dreams, Vietnam, Other Dreams is a result of Marc Levy’s efforts to determine how the war affected his sleep fifty years after the war. In more than 200 entries over a one-year period, he found that, like most vets, war memories are alive in all of us. There are lessons to be learned and savored, as Marc shows us. And we are all the better for them.”
     Charles R. Figley, PhD, Tulane University Kurzweg Distinguished Chair in Disaster Mental Health and Professor and Tulane Traumatology institute Director, New Orleans

“Decades after trauma suffered during the Vietnam War, Marc Levy still has nightly, often troubling dreams. Some are frightening replaying traumas in Vietnam. Some are fantastic. Some are enigmatic. Some border on the funny. Like poetry they challenge the reader to interpret them and to understand the unfinished business that led to many of them.”
     Meir Kryger MD, Professor of Medicine, Yale University. Author of The Mystery of Sleep

“The honesty and vulnerability of Other Dreams gives uspermission to feel, to exercise our emotions. Without narrative or story Levy uses his dreams to weave together a panorama of the humancondition. By giving us hundreds of small glimpses, he’s given us adetailed view of our own subconscious and by doing so he’s also lit forus a pathway to healing.”
     Sean Davis, author of The Jesus He Deserves and The Wax Bullet War

“Other Dreams is a singular, remarkable achievement, the product of dedicated, rigorous attention to the unconscious, and to the words that can recreate it. The regularity of these recordings and Levy’s precise, rhythmic language display an “I” for whom dreams seem more present, more real, than the waking life. Their intensity allows them to mainline human emotions–fear, rage, guilt, ambition, love, lust, mercy–in a span of a few pages. Each dream is an inscrutable parable, shimmering with significance, yet never ponderous. They feel like our country’s secrets.”
     JD Scrimgeour, Salem State University

“I read Other Dreams as a psychoanalytical detective story, looking for clues, without the background narrative of therapy, then let go ofmy professional persona and went with the beautiful flow of recordeddreams, as I do in dream-sharing with fellow members of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.”
     Lou Hagood

“I have been researching and teaching about the Vietnam War for over twenty years, and it is a rare book that forces me to view that conflict “with new eyes,” as it were. This is deceptively simple in conception–a dream journal–but its emotional impact is shattering. The sinister, complex, and long-term effects of PTSD have never, in my judgment, been conveyed so powerfully. The images in these dreams are graphic, cruel, passionate, and often profoundly disturbing, and they are an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the toll the Vietnam War took–and continues to take–on those Americans sent to hold the “free world’s” front line in Southeast Asia.”
     Seth Jacobs, Boston University, author of Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950-1963

“I never figured that Levy would produce a dream record to top his first book in this series, Dreams, Vietnam. But he has done it–in spades. On December 8, 2016, he dreamed: “I’m in a war zone with another person, possibly my brother, walking along a moonlit, snowy path. We pass a wide-open, snow-covered field. I say to the other person, ‘Hey buddy… hey buddy… just keep walking.’ I’m aware that at any moment we may be shot. Each time I say, ‘Hey, buddy…’ the other person tries to crowd me off the path. ‘Hey, buddy… Hey buddy,’ I say, pushing back, ‘Just keep walking.’ ” Levy is always just one short dream away from being back in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Once you have read his dream books, I recommend his classic volume, How Stevie Nearly Lost the War and Other Postwar Stories.”
     David Willson, The VVA Veteran, and author of REMF Diary and No Fixed Address