Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Sweet Dream Baby
Dreams are a popular source for poetry. My hatred of Freudian dream theory aside, I think their twisted logic, random neuron-level associations, and, well, dreaminess can make them excellent poetic material if deployed properly. (Not in a straight-up "let me tell you this dream I had" way. Just think about how bored you are when anyone besides a really good friend starts blathering about some odd dream they had.)
Though my own poetry is fairly straightforward on the spectrum, I have made use of dreams in my work. One poem, "Sleeping Sick," takes snippets from dreams and that half-awake state just before or after sleep, and attempts to recreate or represent the experience of fitful fever dreaming. When I was in junior high, I even wrote a couplet in a dream. It must have been an early sign of my interest in metrical poetry that it was rhymed trochaic tetrameter. I still remember it almost verbatim:
[Some fish], herring, cod, and mullet
All slide down the penguin's gullet.
(It's also indicative of my bookish youth that I knew at that age that a mullet was a fish, but not that it was a hairstyle.)
Anyway, I write this because of a very interesting experience I had this weekend: I had a disturbing dream, not one that I found terrifying while I was in it, but one that definitely unsettled me when I woke up. In it, myself and three other people were stuck in an endlessly repeating horror/slasher movie cycle. Each one would end with three or all of us dead, and then we'd reincarnate in a new movie. In one, one of the people went crazy Shining-style and killed the other three. In the last one before I woke, we were in a small house, fighting off a wave of undead until they overran us, much like Night of the Living Dead (or one of those movies). When I woke up, I knew I had to wake up all the way, or I'd just fall back into that dream. As I thought, I realized I could take a thematic element from that dream and make it into a poem, though I wouldn't use the dream in a literal sense. The next day (Sunday), I finished the whole draft of that poem. A very interesting experience.
So how have you others used dreams in your poetry, if at all?
Though my own poetry is fairly straightforward on the spectrum, I have made use of dreams in my work. One poem, "Sleeping Sick," takes snippets from dreams and that half-awake state just before or after sleep, and attempts to recreate or represent the experience of fitful fever dreaming. When I was in junior high, I even wrote a couplet in a dream. It must have been an early sign of my interest in metrical poetry that it was rhymed trochaic tetrameter. I still remember it almost verbatim:
[Some fish], herring, cod, and mullet
All slide down the penguin's gullet.
(It's also indicative of my bookish youth that I knew at that age that a mullet was a fish, but not that it was a hairstyle.)
Anyway, I write this because of a very interesting experience I had this weekend: I had a disturbing dream, not one that I found terrifying while I was in it, but one that definitely unsettled me when I woke up. In it, myself and three other people were stuck in an endlessly repeating horror/slasher movie cycle. Each one would end with three or all of us dead, and then we'd reincarnate in a new movie. In one, one of the people went crazy Shining-style and killed the other three. In the last one before I woke, we were in a small house, fighting off a wave of undead until they overran us, much like Night of the Living Dead (or one of those movies). When I woke up, I knew I had to wake up all the way, or I'd just fall back into that dream. As I thought, I realized I could take a thematic element from that dream and make it into a poem, though I wouldn't use the dream in a literal sense. The next day (Sunday), I finished the whole draft of that poem. A very interesting experience.
So how have you others used dreams in your poetry, if at all?
Comments:
<< Home
I do! i use images all the time from dreams, because they are so strange and cerebral. most of the time they don't make logical sense to me, but they make emotional sense. i have a lot of dreams about animals, so i use that imagery in poems.
cool topic. robert bly has always struck me as a poet who uses dream-imagery. for instance in this poem:
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six
feet from the house ...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more
books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no
more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a
party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls
leaving the church.
It will not come closer
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch
nothing, and are safe.
The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands.
He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.
The toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust ...
And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back
down the hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away,
and did not climb the hill.
--that last stanza especially, and the figure of the "man in the black coat" feels dream-like--a faceless, ageless, nameless man who is characterized by an article of clothing, one that connotates mystery, death, you don't know if he's angel or grim reaper. i think he's both.
cool topic. robert bly has always struck me as a poet who uses dream-imagery. for instance in this poem:
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six
feet from the house ...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more
books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no
more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a
party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls
leaving the church.
It will not come closer
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch
nothing, and are safe.
The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands.
He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.
And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.
The toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust ...
And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back
down the hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away,
and did not climb the hill.
--that last stanza especially, and the figure of the "man in the black coat" feels dream-like--a faceless, ageless, nameless man who is characterized by an article of clothing, one that connotates mystery, death, you don't know if he's angel or grim reaper. i think he's both.
Steven: I think all poems, on some level, are a form of conscious dreaming (dreaming while we are awake).
I posted a poem the other day, called "Dream of the Cancer Cure," which did arise from an actual dream (a very vivid weird dream, btw).
I posted a poem the other day, called "Dream of the Cancer Cure," which did arise from an actual dream (a very vivid weird dream, btw).
Jenni:
Thanks for posting that Bly poem, which I hadn't read before.
Peter:
I read and very much enjoyed "Dream of the Cancer Cure." Must have been quite a dream. :-)
Post a Comment
Thanks for posting that Bly poem, which I hadn't read before.
Peter:
I read and very much enjoyed "Dream of the Cancer Cure." Must have been quite a dream. :-)
<< Home
