The author, born on an estate in Lithuania to a family with deep rooted traditions and raised in the spirit of social change, describes the people, events and surroundings which formed her awareness of self. The memoir stops at age nine when, after a shattering experience, the child realizes that the core of her being will not survive without an outer shell.
An artist wonders about the differences between emotion and feeling or rational and intellectual activities, and, finding the dictionary of no use, winds up tracing her own mental activities for the next 30 years. Treating every traceable mental and physical sensation as energy-in-motion, she records the movements observed in schematic drawings. In the mapping of sensations and other stirrings she stumbles upon an operating system of the mind. She makes her findings public in the hope that other curious people might have had similar impressions.
The narrative poem In the Wake of Dreams is based on personal dreams recorded during some 65 years. Curious whether dreams had a story to tell, the author grouped them by subject matter, and in the sorting was surprised to find that the more intimate the imagery was the deeper it reached into humanitys collective memory as told in myths. Imagination, caught in the narrative drift, took liberties, combining dreams to extend events or round out the impressions certain dreams had left on her psyche.