National Reading Night is celebrated in schools across the United States, and this year the theme was "Dreams and Reading" so we celebrated the completion of our class anthologies at the Harristown Elementary School reading night. Haiku are like dreams in that they touch our imaginations and move us to feel and remember as if we are living the experiences.

In a recently published study, Inside Out: Haiku and Dreams, Joseph Kirscher looks at how dreams and haiku work in the same way to help us become aware of the significance of ordinary events in our lives. In the introduction, Daniel Lindley, a psychologist with the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago writes:

The haiku, when it works, makes us suddenly aware of our own awareness. The flow of ordinary experience stops for a wonderful moment; we are arrested by our own surprising ability to reflect on our experience at the very moment of having it. The dream, when it works on us . . . does exactly the same thing. We are surprised; we are brought up short; we are in a state of momentary confusion as we puzzle about what we were doing in that enormous mansion, why that dog was following us, why we can't get to the right classroom.

After briefly sharing this sense of what haiku do for us as writers, we had a quick introduction into the art of reading haiku. We enjoyed the haiku painting by Jennifer Griebel, then I read several dream haiku by Kobayashi Issa, Matsuo Bashô and myself.

ill on a journey
my dreams wander on
over withered fields

Matsuo Bashô

•

don't bust into
my dawn dream...
cuckoo! 

•

spring's begun—
I even dream about
the grove of young pines

Kobayashi Issa

translated by Dr. David G. Lanoue
from the Issa web site

four dream haiku by Randy Brooks:

dream apples
              to pick
covers up to my ears

(Northeast magazine, 1981)

•

dream of snow
up to my hips
      car tires spinning

•

snarling wolf
in my summer dream
I can airwalk again

•

stormy night
sleepwalker sniffles
just a dream

Jennifer Griebel designed a special chapbook for each class, gathering at least one haiku by each student in that class. These were bound with Japanese sewing in black foam boards with color prints of the paintings on the covers. We read haiku out loud from these collections, especially by students who were present for the reading night. They enjoyed hearing the haiku again and being surprised to hear new haiku by friends in the school.

We concluded with an open reading time, during which students and parents and grandparents enjoying the haiku by Harristown students from the chapbooks, from notebook collections of all the writings and paintings, and from the large collection of haiku books for children gathered by the Harristown Elementary School librarian.

—Dr. Randy Brooks                      
Millikin University