As described in the Preface, in 1978 my father, Philip J. Davis, wrote to a number of family members, friends, and colleagues asking them for their ideas of the overarching dreams of their discipline or profession. He never found a venue for publishing these. ``The Pafnuty Press'' --- that is, my father and my mother, Hadassah Davis --- assembled the letters, printed off a few dozen booklets, and mailed them to the contributors and other friends.
Some years later, my father and David Park co-edited a somewhat similar collection of essays, No Way! The Nature of the Impossible, (W.H. Freeman, 1987) with many of the same authors, discussing the significance of the idea of impossibility in different disciplines.
My father died two years ago today. Since then I have put his unpublished work onto the Web, including, now, this Dreams project. It has always been a personal favorite of mine among his many works; I find the letters are often thought-provoking, sometimes moving, and they have shaped my thinking over the 42 years since I first read them.
I have left the letters as digital scans of the original rather than putting them into a uniform format. The different typewritten formats have a period charm, it seems to me. A few letters have been omitted for technical reasons. I have slightly updated the "Brief Lives" of the contributors that my parents put together, adding a small amount of more recent information, mostly death dates.
I am grateful to the authors and their heirs who have given permission to publish these. Dr. James Goodwin and Dr. Jean Goodwin have asked me to add footnotes, updating their letters to reflect their current thoughts; these are included as separate documents.
— Ernest Davis, March 14, 2020.