“My Dream” was first transcribed in Frances Densmore’s book of collected translations, Poems from Sioux and Chippewa Songs (Self-published, 1917). About poems that Densmore translated, Kenneth Rexroth, an American poet, translator, and essayist, wrote in “American Indian Songs,” printed in Assays (New Directions, 1961), “The intense aesthetic realization which precedes the poem is a realization of identity with a beneficent environment. Often this is focused in a dream or vision, waking or sleeping, after [a] long lonely fast and vigil in the forest or desert. An aspect of the environment, an animal or a natural object or force, appears to the Indian, waiting in a trance state, and gives him the song, which remains his most precious possession and the pivot of his life forever after. As such, however simple, these songs always express mutual acceptance and approval of the self and the other, focused but also generalized, amounting to identification.”