Book details

  • Genre:poetry
  • Sub-genre:Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss
  • Language:English
  • Pages:268
  • eBook ISBN:9798317837655

Night Flights

The Poetry of Soul Retrieval

By Valerie Johns

Overview

Every night, without effort or intention, we are sent messages. From the deepest Self, from the unconscious, from whatever name you give to the intelligence that moves beneath waking life. Most of us wake and let them dissolve — chasing the day's answers in the day's noise, never knowing that the answers arrived hours earlier, wrapped in image and symbol and the strange grammar of sleep. Night Flights is an invitation to read the postcards.I n this second book from poet and psychotherapist Valerie Johns, dreams become the primary text — not metaphor, not decoration, but direct transmission from the psyche. Each poem arises from an actual dream: massive serpents and tiny hidden birds, beloved horses who return to reassure, dead friends riding shotgun, the shadow self confronted and tended rather than fled. Guided by Jung, Buddhism, and Hindu mythology, and accompanied by the Vagabond Poet Samuel Beckett as a kind of Virgil through the underworld, Johns moves through terror and beauty, aging and eros, grief and the stubborn return of joy — and brings back, each morning, what the night had to say.Where her debut memoir Ashes in the Milk was the descent into childhood and adult trauma — the finding of language for wounds that arrived before language existed — Night Flights is what becomes possible on the other side. Not consolation. Not resolution. Something more alive than either: the luxurious knowing of the deepest Self without fear.For anyone who goes to sleep at night.
Read more

Description

Every night, without effort or intention, we are sent messages. From the deepest Self, from the unconscious, from whatever name you give to the intelligence that moves beneath waking life. Most of us wake and let them dissolve with the light — chasing the day's answers in the day's noise, never knowing that the answers arrived hours earlier, wrapped in image and symbol and the strange grammar of sleep. Night Flights is an invitation to read the postcards. In this second book from poet and psychotherapist Valerie Johns, dreams become the primary text — not metaphor, not decoration, but direct transmission from the psyche. Each poem arises from an actual dream, documented over years in the dream journal that began during the pandemic and grew until it had become, without fully intending it, a book. Massive serpents and tiny hidden birds. Beloved horses who died and return in dreams to say I will be here, waiting for you. Dead friends riding shotgun. Fat ladies hanging in trees demanding tending. Aliens dying in bathrooms. Love fracturing, reforming, fracturing again. The shadow self — not fled, not interpreted from a safe clinical distance, but met, sat with, tended, and allowed to speak. Guided by Jung, Buddhism, and Hindu mythology, and accompanied by the Vagabond Poet Samuel Beckett as a kind of Virgil through the underworld, Johns moves through the full territory of a psyche that has earned its complexity: pre-verbal trauma and its long reach, the conflation of eroticism with violation, the repeated excavations we perform on our pasts until integration becomes possible, aging and the refusal to yield to its cultural diminishments, collective suffering and feminist consciousness, and always — the animals. The horses and dogs who have died and who return in the dreamtime to reassure us that love does not end with a body. Where her debut poetic memoir Ashes in the Milk was the descent — the hard, necessary finding of language for wounds that arrived before language existed — Night Flights is what becomes possible on the other side. Not consolation. Not resolution. Something more alive than either: the luxurious knowing of the deepest Self without fear. In the book's final movement, Johns writes: I am ascending… I wake smiling, yet again / and stretch myself out into my life. This is a book structured like dreaming itself — fractal, associative, embodied — each poem containing the whole: trauma and tenderness, rage and devotion, terror and beauty repeating at different scales. It is Jungian work in its raw state: not theory, not interpretation, but psyche speaking for itself in images sharp enough to cut. It is also, unexpectedly, often darkly funny. Johns is a therapist who knows how to sit with shadow, and a dreamer who refuses to dominate it. She pauses, asks questions, listens, and tells the truth with a bluntness that startles and liberates. Night Flights is dedicated: For anyone who goes to sleep at night. The dedication is the whole argument. The dreaming life belongs to everyone — and in these pages, Valerie Johns shows what becomes possible when we finally stop letting it go. Advance Praise "We are being built as we sleep… Valerie Johns has written a brave and honest collection of poems, each based on a dream she has had, each honoring the vast gifts and challenges our unconscious minds offer us if we have the courage and stamina and determination to plumb them and take their messages seriously. Johns — whose understanding is deeply inspired by Jung and Buddhism and Hindu mythology as well as by history, feminism, and collective suffering — confronts her Shadow and engages with it. Despite the impulses to run away that arise over and over, Johns does not look away from pain or loss. As Rilke wrote, 'Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.' Johns allows that. Read them, resonate with them, and stretch yourself out into your life." — Anita Barrows, poet, psychologist, professor
Read more

About The Author

Valerie Johns is a Los Angeles-based psychotherapist, poet, and author whose work lives at the intersection of deep healing, lyrical prose, and the life of the unconscious. For more than thirty-five years she has accompanied others through their most formative wounds — in the consulting room, in the classroom, and increasingly, on the page. Her debut poetic memoir, Ashes in the Milk, traces the long arc of recovery from pre-verbal and early childhood trauma through adolescence and adult life, arriving finally at the hard-won territory of integration and voice. Structured in stanzas rather than chapters — a formal choice as clinical as it is artistic — the book mirrors the way trauma actually lives in the body: in fragments, in silences, in the connective tissue that goes missing before we have words for its absence. Jim Cirigliano called it "a poem that reads like a novel." Blurbs came from Kevin Nealon, Christina McDowell — whose own memoir ran in the New York Times — and the poet and psychologist Anita Barrows, translator of Rilke's Book of Hours. Readers describe finishing it and immediately reaching for someone they knew was carrying something unspoken. Her second book, Night Flights, forthcoming in June 2026, is dream poetry — the luxurious knowing of the deepest selves without fear. Where Ashes in the Milk was the descent, the reckoning, the finding of language for what preceded language, Night Flights is what becomes possible on the other side: the self no longer excavating but inhabiting, moving freely through the interior landscape that dreamwork opens. Together the two books form a complete arc — wound and emergence, excavation and flight. Valerie's writing life began in second grade, when her teacher Mrs. Best set her first poem to music and the whole class sang it. That early encounter with the power of authentic voice never left her. She went on to study with Jack Grapes as one of his first students in The Method — a practice that distills the tools of method acting for writers, asking them to use the same skills an actor uses to become a character in order to become the work itself, to locate writing not in craft alone but in genuine somatic and emotional truth. She later served as Poet in Residence at Pacific Palisades Elementary School, where she taught children The Method, published their work, and held poetry readings — giving young writers the same experience she had been given: the discovery that their authentic voice was already there, waiting. As a clinician, Valerie holds a master's degree in clinical psychology and is trained in hypnosis, dreamtending, and mindbody therapies. She served as an adjunct professor at Antioch University Los Angeles for twelve years, teaching the next generation of therapists in the tradition of depth apsychology. Her private practice has been a constant through more than three decades of her own transformation — she has sat with others in their darkness even as she was finding her own way through. That way through had many passages. Recovery beginning in 1985 brought her out of the free-spirited and often chaotic years of the 1970s and early 1980s and into the slower, more exacting work of self-knowledge. Buddhist-informed psychotherapy arrived early in her clinical training and never left — Jizo meditation, with its particular tenderness toward those who are lost or in transition, became a sustaining practice. Dreamtending, rooted in the Jungian tradition of Stephen Aizenstadt, gave her a method for working with the unconscious that was neither purely analytical nor purely intuitive but alive to image, to body, to the dreaming mind's own intelligence. During the pandemic, a dream journal she began grew and grew until it had become, without her fully intending it, the foundation of both books. She has described the writing as arriving not only from the mind but through it — through fascia work, through the journal, through years of sitting with what could not yet be said.
Read more