Night Flights

Every night, without effort or intention, we receive messages — from the unconscious, from whatever intelligence moves beneath waking life. Most of us let them vanish each morning. Night Flights is an invitation to read the postcards psyche has sent. In this second book from poet and psychotherapist Valerie Johns, dreams become the primary text — not metaphor, not decoration, but direct transmission from the soul. Massive serpents and hidden birds. Beloved horses who died and return. Dead friends riding shotgun. The shadow self — not fled from, but met, sat with, and allowed to speak. Guided by Jung, Buddhism, and myth — with dream ally Samuel Beckett as Virgil through the underworld — Johns moves through the full territory of a psyche that has earned its complexity: pre-verbal trauma, eroticism and violation, feminist consciousness, aging, and always the animals. Where Ashes in the Milk was the descent, Night Flights is what becomes possible on the other side. Something alive: the knowing of the deepest Self without fear. Fractal, associative, embodied — and unexpectedly, often darkly funny. Night Flights is dedicated: For anyone who goes to sleep at night. It's an invitation to know yourself. 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 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