The poem begins like an anecdote told across a kitchen table: "I once hit my head / so hard". The line break after "hard" leaves a beat in which we expect stars, a blackout, a trip to the hospital. What we get is "dreams leaked out," delivered in the same flat tone as a nosebleed. "Leaked" is a word from plumbing and accidents, not from magic, so the skull becomes a cracked container and dreams become a liquid that was held inside it. The deadpan voice makes the impossible sound like a minor mishap, and that mix of calm and strangeness is what drives the poem.
Once the dreams are out, the speaker tries to describe them and keeps admitting how hard that is. They are "semi-solid / things," and the word "things" sits alone on its line because the speaker has no better name for them. "Gelatinous" feels as soft as it sounds, and the comparison to "something from the dark / reaches near the bottom / of the ocean" moves the scene far from the bedroom. These dreams seem like deep-sea creatures, soft-bodied and glowing, and they belong to a part of the mind we never visit awake. The colors, "pale, icy colored reds and blues and greens," form the longest line in the poem, as if the speaker slows down to admire them. Even there the language is a little paradoxical, since reds are not usually icy. The colors are borrowed from the world but don't quite fit it.
The next detail is the cleverest: "I could never view them directly / but only from the corner / of my eye." Anyone who has tried to hold onto a dream after waking knows the experience, since looking straight at it makes it dissolve. The speaker also seems oddly dignified about it, like a naturalist who accepts that the rarest animals can only be glimpsed sideways. Then comes the poem's only question mark: "there were not many / perhaps half a dozen?" The uncertainty is funny, because he is counting what he cannot look at, and "half a dozen" brings the vast ocean down to the scale of an egg carton.
After that the poem changes tense. Everything so far was past, a story about "once," but now the dreams are present and still around: "if I allow life to slow / or backslide / my dreams, they get agitated." "Backslide" carries moral weight, the sort of word used for falling back into a bad habit, so the poem treats a slow life as a small failure. It is hard not to hear a second meaning in "dreams" here. They are the night visions that leaked out, but they could also be ambitions, the things a person hopes to do. On that reading, the creatures need a life that keeps moving, and neglecting them makes them restless. "Agitated" sounds almost clinical, the word you would use for a pacing animal. The speaker has become a keeper of something that needs exercise.
Then the punchline: "once, one of them even kicked me / in the shin." After all the glowing, half-seen beauty, we get a small, ordinary, painful kick. The shin is an unglamorous target, and the line break before "in the shin" gives the joke its timing. The kick also shows that these delicate things have legs, will, and impatience. Notably, it is also the first full stop in the poem. Everything before it drifts on with commas, line breaks, and a single question mark, and the period lands as the kick does.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its short, uneven lines follow the rhythm of speech, hesitating where the speaker hesitates. Because the voice is so casual, the strange claims feel believable.
What makes the poem memorable is how it combines wonder with humor without letting either spoil the other. It takes the familiar idea of dreams as private and weightless and makes them physical, awkward, and demanding. It also suggests, lightly and without preaching, that imagination is not something we own so much as something we have to keep up with, or else it will let us know.