Five short lines, and the speaker has changed address: he has left the world and, strangely, seems pleased about it. Dave Bonta's "Dreamtime" never says where he has gone or why. It only reports what remains, and the surprise is that what remains feels like plenty.
The opening phrase, "Clock by clock," borrows the rhythm of expressions like "step by step" or "bit by bit," which suggest slow, patient progress. But steps and bits are things we take, and here the unit is the clock, the instrument that normally keeps us tied to the world's schedule. The speaker is drawn away by the very thing that measures ordinary life, and by "a strange time" that seems to have a will of its own, since it "called" him. The verb matters. To be called is to be summoned, perhaps to a vocation, perhaps to sleep, perhaps to something darker. The title, with its dream and its time fused into one word, hints that this other time runs by different rules. The poem leaves open whether we are reading about sleep, old age, solitude, or something close to death, and that openness is part of its pull.
The poem's centre of gravity is the third line: "I live in a sufficiency of parts." Having just been called out of the world, the speaker insists on the present tense: *I live*. The word "sufficiency" is modest and a little old-fashioned. It means enough, not abundance, and it sounds like someone who has stopped wanting more. "Parts" is the odd word. A person is usually imagined as a whole, but this speaker thinks of himself as an assembly of pieces, and the colon at the end of the line promises an inventory.
The inventory is brief and humble: "old hands, ear, / heart as cheerful as a bed." Notice that the hands are "old," the only part given an age, and that "ear" is singular and unadorned. Neither is described with any self-pity. The list is also a quiet bit of sound-play. "Hands" and "heart" share their opening breath, and the word "heart" has "ear" tucked inside it, so the last two items in the list are already joined. A heart that contains an ear is a heart that listens, which suits a speaker who has been called and has answered.
Then comes the poem's strangest comparison. We expect a heart to be warm, heavy, or broken, not "as cheerful as a bed." The simile pulls the heart out of the realm of grand emotion and into the household. A bed is where we stop performing, lie down, and let dreams come, so it ties back to the title. It is also a place of birth, illness, and death, so the cheerfulness is not naive. Beds are plain, useful, and unembarrassed about their purpose, and the speaker wants his heart to be like that.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its music comes from line length and pacing. The first two lines make one smooth, unhurried sentence. The third is the longest and slows over the stately "sufficiency." The fourth is the shortest, a clipped, broken-off line that sounds like the speaker counting what he has. The last line stretches out again, ending on the soft, rounded "bed," so the poem finishes by lying down. Without rhyme to close it, the poem ends on its image and stops.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it declines to do. It offers no explanation for the strange time, no grief at leaving the world, and no grand claim about the self. Instead, it suggests that being pulled out of the usual order of things need not be frightening, and that a person reduced to a few parts, with aging hands, one listening ear and a comfortable heart, can still call that enough. In five lines it turns the idea of loss into something closer to ease.