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  • The Stories We Need to Hear or The Reader and the Tale
  • Roni Natov (bio)

Like most introspective adults, I always seem to be trying to retrieve what I left behind in my childhood. I find my conscious self hovering over as I dream —what will my dreams reveal? I never worry about decoding. I assume I will know how to read them and am always delighted (even though the dreams themselves may be frightening or humiliating) to discover the rich symbolism of the unconscious. When I wrote poems, most of them came from this place. I would dream, record the dream immediately upon waking, and with amazement feel my conscious self running after the dreamer, trying to catch up, fascinated by what I didn't know I knew.

Dreams are the stories we create to tell ourselves what we need to know —about ourselves and about the world we at least think we live in, our experience of the world, or the world as it has appeared to us. As a child I loved to read stories and had many favorites. But there was one I wanted to hear over and over again. Like a recurring dream, it would tell me something I needed to know, some message which fascinated and comforted me.

The story I am referring to is entitled Lisa and Lottie.1 It is about two girls who look identical and meet at a summer camp to discover they are twins and have been separated since infancy, each brought up by one parent and unaware that the other exists. Rereading the story as an adult and reliving some of its freshness, I am touched by certain parts now, as I was then. I feel like I am learning something old in a new way about myself —about who I was as a child and what I needed, and about what I still need and want. What children hear when adults read to them or what they see on the printed page is most mysterious to adults. Although the relationship between the reader and text remains elusive in some ways for adult readers too, it has been recorded by adults, as they note their idiosyncratic responses and evaluations of particular works. Children, that essentially silent audience, often cannot provide us with that kind of introspection. Thus, the process remains relatively undefined, except when we are making general assumptions about children's tastes, or perhaps when we are tracing an individual child's responses to a particular work through the kind of personal analysis that I am attempting here. [End Page 11]

As a child I remember feeling alone, perhaps not more so than other children, but then I did not know this. I felt freakish. My perceptions seemed somehow to deny much of what I was told about the world. I remember noticing irrationality, at times cruelty, on the part of my parents —humiliating things they would say to me, about me. But they loved me. I didn't understand how this could be till much later, because the mere mention of such contradictions would send them into an intense state of denial and I would wind up guilty for the offense —for their guilt? I didn't know for what, but I knew not to voice these feelings. Also I learned to be ashamed of my feelings. Also I learned to put on a cheerful friendly front to protect my parents, whose protection was essential to my own. During this time of self-doubt, which is inherent in the state of childhood, I also came to trust and be proud of much of what I learned at home. But what I especially needed to read about, what I still need to dream about, is not only what nourished me and made me strong, but what terrified me and left me feeling undermined.

What I initially loved about this story, aside from the delicious mystery of identity inherent in any story about twins, secrets, and discovery, was the fact that there seemed to be two of one child. I longed for there to be another of me, so that I would never be alone. Sameness was a...

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