Peter E. Williams's Dreaming of Dreaming opens with a dedication to a cat named Go, then immediately establishes a voice that is unguarded and conversational. The poem 'Nuts' begins with the line 'Crazy as a cashew,' a simile that sets the tone for a collection unafraid of self-mockery. Throughout, Williams moves between tender recollections—such as dreaming of a lost cat—and sardonic observations on work, gambling, and social hypocrisy. The diction is deliberately plain, often colloquial, yet punctuated by sudden lyrical turns. This editorial note examines the authorial choices in diction, dialogue, and description that shape the collection's distinctive voice.

Colloquial Diction and Self-Deprecation

Williams frequently adopts a casual, almost throwaway tone that belies the emotional weight of his subjects. In 'Nuts,' he describes his life as 'Sheer luxury' after listing a monotonous routine: 'Always the same old job, 17 years of it. Go nowhere. Be nobody. Do nothing.' The repetition of short, clipped clauses mimics a shrug, while the ironic praise of 'luxury' undercuts the bleakness. Similarly, in 'Shame,' the line 'Blissful, lucky, shame' strings together three contradictory adjectives, compressing a complex attitude into a single breath. This technique recurs throughout: Williams uses plain language to express ambivalence, often undercutting his own statements with a wry twist.

Dreams as a Descriptive Framework

The title poem, 'Dreaming of dreaming with my cat,' uses a dream sequence to explore loss and comfort. Williams describes the dream as 'very pleasant,' with the cat 'curled up on my back,' and notes that such dreams are 'always the best.' The description is tactile and specific, grounding the ethereal in physical sensation. Yet he immediately complicates this by acknowledging the need to wake: 'I’d never get to see the beautiful day in store for me.' This tension between the dream world and waking reality recurs in 'Piffle the Cat,' where the dream becomes a space for unresolved grief. The cat 'needed my love and my reassurance,' and the poem reveals a backstory of violent death, told in short, broken lines that mirror the shock of loss.

Direct Address and Unfiltered Confession

Several poems adopt a confessional mode that borders on diary entry. In 'Lovely Passenger Lust,' Williams writes about a prostitute who is 'one of my best friends,' and insists on the consensual, straightforward nature of their arrangement: 'we know what we are doing and we are both consenting adults and that’s really all that needs to be said.' The bluntness is striking, and the refusal to moralize is a deliberate authorial choice. Elsewhere, in 'What is love ? #2,' he catalogs his affections in a sprawling list—'I love my Mum & Dad, and yes, my brother too'—before admitting, 'But I don’t have someone special in my life.' The shift from expansive love to personal lack is abrupt, and the poem ends with a shrug: 'Hey , I’m only human.' These moments of raw disclosure are never sentimentalized; Williams undercuts them with humor or deflation.

Wordplay and Formal Experiments

Williams occasionally breaks from free verse into structured wordplay. 'Therefore' is a short logical syllogism that parodies deductive reasoning: 'That is a poem it is a lyric verse / all lyric verses are poetry, / therefore all poetry is lyric verse.' The faulty logic is obvious, and the poem functions as a joke about categorization. 'Bill of Rights Cut-up (last 3)' recombines phrases from the U.S. Bill of Rights into a collage, stripping legal language of its original context. 'Forked!' adopts mock-archaic diction—'Thoust spake lies'—for a brief curse. And 'Just ‘orrible' plays with dialect and repetition: 'Now ‘orrible Ed had an ‘orrible ‘ead.' These experiments show a poet willing to disrupt his own voice, using form as a kind of play.

Williams's collection rewards attention to small verbal gestures: the dropped articles, the sudden shifts from earnest to ironic, the way a dream sequence can hold both comfort and grief. Readers may find it useful to read the poems aloud, as the rhythms are often conversational and the humor depends on timing. The book does not offer a unified argument or narrative arc; instead, it presents a series of moments, each with its own mood and register. Approach it as a set of sketches from a single, distinctive consciousness.