Dream Writing
Even casual writers experience the agony of writers’ block. You want to express something, but you just can’t put your finger on what that something is. Unbeknownst to you, you actually do know what you want to say. The information is simply hiding in a part of your brain that you are unaware of: your subconscious.
Your dreams are a natural reservoir of your deepest desires and fears: the primordial goo that art is made of. Poetry is self-expression in one of its rawest forms. So if you’re looking for poetic inspiration, your own brain deserves a good look!
The trick is to start writing as soon as you wake up, before the dream runs away from your mind. The easiest detail to lose is the mood of the dream, which is probably the most important aspect. You want to make sure that, along with WHAT happened, you’re also describing HOW it made you or other characters in the dream feel. (For those of you having trouble with dream recall, there are various sources on the Web with tips to help you remember your dreams. You can also practice so-called lucid dreaming techniques, in which you train yourself to remember your dreams so vividly that you feel as if they really occurred).
You will find that simply describing your dreams in proficient prose can easily give way to exciting poetic discoveries. Dreams tend to be bizarre and highly symbolic – sometimes interpreting your own dreams can prove quite a challenge! They are frequently full of profound paradoxes and raw emotion (think of the intense terror of a vivid nightmare). You can fashion a complex narrative poem or simply fixate on the often-specific emotion your dream inspired, such as “gleeful horror” or “hollow contentment.” You may often be surprised at the nature of the content you produce – it may even feel as if it came from someone else! – but everything you write down that morning will be 100% You. Of course, you may want to edit and refine this original writing to consider elements such as structure, diction, changing names to protect the innocent, and so on. But if nothing else, your dreams can provide fascinating topics and points of initiation for poems as well as other art forms.
With that, I present to you an example of a dream-derived work of my own, created using the process described above, an odd little apocalyptic number unceremoniously titled “Dream #1.”
An accidental, (partial)
nuclear holocaust on earth
instigated by paranoid, self-serving
otherworlders
Standing on a balcony, looking at the clouds
of plutonium fallout,
watching whirlwinds of snaking sand/debris/detritus
work their way through the frictionless landscape
Authority Man comes out, surveying and inquiring and informing,
as a beautiful vortex draws near, looking
uglier and uglier
as it
approaches
passes
over us
and beautiful again
on the dark horizon shimmering with dust
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Authority Man says
with shaking confidence
as we all uncringe and look down
to see a man
bald with sharp, striking eyebrows
screaming up
to our balcony
At first we ignore him but soon
he’s throwing bowling balls of all sizes
tries to kill me, that fuck
I take up bowling balls of my own
(or maybe they’re his)
and launch them down.
I have the upper hand, the gravitational
advantage, but it still takes awhile
for him to die, but I love it.
It’s a game, he hurt me
so I hurt him more
and come out on top.
