A Lifelike Dream

On August 1, 2005 at 8:30 in the morning at the Oxford Union on the campus of Oxford University, I got the opportunity of a lifetime to present a paper I had written, entitled "Beyond Reading 1st: The Teaching of Reading and Writing" to a group of 44 educators from all over the United States. This paper, and the concluding statement, summed up everything I had learned about teaching over an almost forty year career. As I stood in that Debate Hall, I realized the significance of this event in my life. Three years before, I had had a dream one night that I was in England teaching British students literature on redwood picnic tables outside an old building. As I entered that Union building on that day, I passed the picnic tables in my dreams. The whole experience seemed to me to be a waking dream. But I was really there. In my concluding statement to the presentation, I tried to tie all of what I was thinking and feeling together to present it to fellow educators, and to tell them that I understood the importance of the moment. This is what I said:

“Now I want to tell you about my second dream, a waking dream.
My father was a sailor on a minesweeper in the invasion of Normandy. He was stationed here in England, in Torquay, during the rest of the World War II. When he returned to the United States after the war, he had no job. We lived for four years in temporary military housing on Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn, and then in a NYC public housing project for the next seven years until we could afford to buy a house in New Jersey. When I looked out the windows of the projects, I saw asphalt and concrete. However, my worlds were not the brick buildings and streets of the projects. My worlds were the London of Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes, the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood, the Stratford and London of William Shakespeare, the Camelot of King Arthur, the Sahara sands of Percival Christopher Wren, and the high seas of Kidnapped and Captains Courageous. Later they became the English country manors of Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, the solitude of Tintern Abbey and the fields of the Lake District. I roamed the moors with Pip and Joe Gargery, with Cathy and Heathcliffe, and with Holmes and Watson in pursuit of the hound of the Baskervilles. I plied the Mississippi with Huck Finn and Jim. And I too returned to Hogwarts (which looks surprisingly like Oxford) every two or three years with Ron, Hermione and Harry Potter. These books allowed me, as a child, to search for who I was and who I could be.
It is time for this literature to leave the dusty glass under which it resides as the private preserve of the few and take its rightful place as the birthright of all of our children. It will allow them too to dream of worlds more noble and heroic than the ones they presently inhabit. It will finally allow them to share my dream.
It is because of these books and the invitation of The Oxford Round Table that today, I have fulfilled that dream.”

As I looked out at these educators arrayed around me in a horseshoe, I wondered if they felt the same way I did. I didn't know, but I hoped they did. It was a great feeling. Later, I wrote a poem about the experience.

Oxford Dreams
Christopher Bogart

Two broad spreading trees
Stand calmly –
Their leafy arms extended,
Hand-holding,
And gathering to themselves
Stone buildings,
Stained
By tenure and still time.

Faded wooden benches
Scatter round the ground
Below the trees…
These learning trees…
Where once, in a dream,
I taught English literature to English lads –
An American
In an English dream…
That seems
So very long ago.

Now, in a new dream,
I sit on these same benches
Of faded and fading wood
Surrounded by stone rooms,
The libraries of aging books in towering cases
Walling in the groaning,
Sagging,
Buffed green leather of overstuffed chairs,
There not to protect
But to persuade,
Nascent readers with the wide world
Contained for now
In their soft calf-skin bindings.

Light,
Like Enlightenment
Invades
Through panes of leaded glass –
Clear glass,
Stained glass…
Soft light
That drifts to the aged oaken floors
Below their pains.

I wonder if by now I
Can finally see
Through this thick glass,
Stained once by the crimson drops of my own fears
To the life on the other side
Of this life -
Like dream.