I've been having oddly vivid dreams lately, featuring clowns who hide in closets, my high school photography teacher and people I used to know whom I could probably find on Facebook if I ever got up the energy to actually create a Facebook profile. I've heard all sorts of theories on what dreams actually mean, but more than anything, dreams are where we go to escape, that nighttime netherworld where the concerns of the day mean nothing, or reinvent themselves as creatures or objects that are less menacing and easier to defeat. And we can't forget about daydreams, those delicious bites of time that we carve out for ourselves in the middle of class, during a boring movie or when our parents start regaling us with tales of their youth. Without them, how would we survive? The everyday world just isn't colourful enough.

In this Spring 2010 issue, our contributors took the the idea of dreams to extreme poles. Abdullah Malik and Brayden Hirsch both offer short stories that explore the darker side of dreams--nightmares both real and unreal, that expose our deepest fears about love, security and the demons that are always trying to get in. And this issue's lineup of visual artists is truly impressive--Ellie Jin's "Surrealist Composition" and RuiLin Guo's "The End of the Road" are how we see in dreams, where nothing appears makes sense and everything is seemingly disconnected until we discover that they're really not.

So read a little, look a little and dream a little.

Jen Sookfong Lee, Editor