Poetry by Rowan Evans

Author’s Note

Dreaming Wrong came from the strange feeling of being inside a dream that looks familiar but somehow isn’t yours. The moon is still there. The path is still recognizable. The water is still waiting—but everything has been rearranged just enough to make the entire landscape feel wrong.

I wanted to play with that feeling of dream logic: the moment when your mind recognizes the pieces but realizes they no longer fit together. The ocean becomes a pond, the tide disappears, the moon loses its reflection, and even the heavens become impossible to navigate.

For me, the unsettling part isn’t that the dream is frightening. It’s that it feels incorrect. Like waking life has been reconstructed by someone who knows what everything is supposed to look like—but doesn’t quite understand what it means.

Sometimes the strangest dreams aren’t nightmares.

Sometimes they’re simply dreaming wrong.

— Rowan Evans

Dreaming Wrong
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I slipped from waking life,
drifted into night—
but it felt different,
like the imagery wasn’t right.

The moon looked paler than usual,
so I asked if she was sick—
of course, she didn’t answer back.
But I followed the same paths
that I had many nights before.

I walked along
until I hit the edge of the—

pond?

Where was the ocean at,
where was the shore—
and why couldn’t I
feel the tide anymore?

Everything felt off there.

I was on my knees,
staring at the water—
where was the shimmer,
I couldn’t see the reflection
of the moon—

I looked straight ahead,
and the silence seemed
to stretch further.

Then my eyes looked to the sky
and I realized that I couldn’t
map the path across the heavens.

It’s like as soon my head hit the pillow—
I entered somebody else’s mind,
because nothing about this
felt like mine—

I was dreaming wrong.

That’s the only thing
that can explain,
what was going on.

Journey into the Hexverse…

[Beach to Beach (How I Get There)]
A dream becomes a journey between familiar shores and unfamiliar cities in Beach to Beach (How I Get There), a poem about imagined travel, ocean crossings, longing, and the places we hope to someday reach while awake.

[Where the Metaphors Lead]
Some truths are easier to write than they are to say aloud. “Where the Metaphors Lead” explores the quiet space between dreams, confession, and the courage it takes to let another person know how deeply they’ve become woven into your inner world.

[The World Shifted Around Us]
The world transformed around us—beach, city streets, jungle—but we never moved. Sometimes love isn’t found in words, but in the quiet certainty of someone remaining clear while everything else fades.

[The Streets I Walk When I Sleep]
“The Streets I Walk When I Sleep” is a deeply intimate free verse poem about recurring dreams, emotional connection, longing across distance, and the strange feeling of remembering places and moments that have never happened in waking life.

[Across the Page-cific]
A playful, autobiographical journey through the strange places poetry can take me—from sandwich heartbreak and pasta diss poems to gothic monsters, mythology, ravens, ghosts, and storms across the page. Beneath the absurdity is something deeply personal: the realization that writing gave me a way to rebuild myself, piece by piece.

If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]