IT’S JUST A DREAM

A high schooler’s dream-visits with God lead him to question everything in Zion’s philosophical short story.

Max Hope is a typical teenager, hanging out by the sports fields at school and smoking joints with his friends. He’s been having a strange dream lately in which he’s a little kid again, sitting in the kitchen with his grandfather Henry, eating sour rye soup and asking the older man questions about the world. (What is destiny? What is God? What is life?) Once Max realizes that he is in a dream—these are not true memories, since he has no recollection of the long-deceased Henry—he understands that something else is going on; Max asks if he is actually speaking to God. “If that’s the terminology you prefer,” responds Henry. “Throughout the ages, I’ve been called by many names.” These conversations with the Almighty leave Max feeling adrift. He realizes his friendships are shallow and unrewarding and begins to take notice of Julia, the attractive and witty girl who sits in front of him in physics class. When things take a turn for the disturbing, Max is left to scramble after answers to the same questions his dream-self asked of Henry: What is his destiny, what is his life, who is Max meant to be? The story is shorter than even its 38-page length suggests, with only a few brief paragraphs appearing on each page. Zion’s writing is minimal and straightforward, sometimes to the point of clunkiness: “‘Now I know how Atlas felt when he suddenly had to carry the whole world on his shoulders,’ [Max] thought, as that same world suddenly felt impossibly heavy.” While the premise is a strong one—Max is at just the age when people begin asking these questions in earnest—the story ends before it really gets going, with no resolution beyond a few aphorisms from Hindu philosophy. More scenes with Max confronting these ideas in his life outside of the dream world might have made for a more memorable story.

A thought-provoking but underdeveloped meditation on the purpose of life.