Editor’s Introduction

Jorge Maestre Martí’s The Dream moves within the delicate terrain where grief, memory, and superstition overlap—where the boundaries between the living and the dead are neither fixed nor wholly reliable. Set against the rural Spain of the early twentieth century, this story lingers in a world still shaped by ritual, still pierced by the silence of lost children and the weight of unanswered prayers.

At its heart, The Dream is a meditation on the persistence of love beyond death, and on the stubborn refusal of one man, Rafael Martí, to surrender entirely to despair. Through dreams, scents, and the repeated gestures of work and mourning, Maestre Martí captures the haunting paradox of human grief: that it both binds us to what has been lost and offers, however briefly, a return.

The story also echoes an older philosophical question: what is real—the world we wake into, or the world we long for in dreams? In this quiet, devastating narrative, salvation comes not through faith, nor through science, but through the persistence of love’s attention. And perhaps this, Maestre Martí seems to suggest, is the truest defiance against death: to listen closely, to keep watch, to dare believe that breath might yet return.