Sarah Long's Tread softly because you tread on my dreams performs a fluid girlhood that invites the listener into the confidence of the autofictional character, Mary. She shares her strange visions in an effort to decipher their meanings. The work plays with the notion of the aisling, an Irish poetic genre where the nation appears to the poet in a dream in the form of a woman. Mary’s dreams offer a critique of inherited language and storytelling systems, while highlighting themes and motifs that reverberate throughout Irish culture such as the impact of colonialism, Celtic mythology and an affinity with the land.

https://fermynwoods.org/fermynwoods-podcast-28-sarah-long/