Year of the Monkey: Patti Smith on Dreams, Loss, Love, and Mending the Broken Realities of Life

“One cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.”

“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us,” Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando — her groundbreaking novel that gallops across centuries of history, across lines of logic and convention, to telescope a vision for a different future of the human heart.

There are moments in life when it is no longer clear whether we dream our dreams or are dreamt by them — moments when reality...