I’ve particularly enjoyed this thread because we’ve all tried our best to say how dreams effect our poetry yet none of us know the answer—even as we examine our own most precious, creative, and intimate experiences. That’s extraordinary.

I don’t get to see many movies, so when I refer to a film it’s usually pretty ancient, and often a little low. I have no idea how the world received Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 film, “Contact,” but I know the images struck me with an original force I rarely experience outside of dreams. The huge construction itself was potent for me, and the whirling and whirling and whirling a cranking up of my own psyche I rarely experience. Then the vertigo of passage through multiple dimensions only to arrive at the most familiar, most intimate, most hum-drum encounter, on the beach, no less—the sort of family drama we all die for yet forget even as it’s happening.

Profound in the extreme, and I suspect very near The Truth.

With the film in mind I recently read Carl Sagan’s “The Varieties of Scientific Experience,” and found it tremendously disappointing. Because Carl Sagan had also written the novel upon which “Contact” was based, I assumed the great man would apply his mind to the possibility that the way we human beings think, even at its very highest and best, even as a cosmologist, is always limited by the dimensions through which, and in which, and for which we seem to exist—that indeed big and small, near and far, here and there are not necessarily the way it is at all.

And he didn’t, not once—almost as if the thought had never occurred to him. And indeed perhaps it hadn’t, even though as an artist he had incarnated it.

Which is the point.

The huge variety of dream experiences in relation to writing poetry that have been expressed in this thread is more proof of that pudding. Because even our dream-life is so stubbornly particular—which leaves only our poetry through which to get a true glimpse not just of the universal but of the universe.

Better even than the Hubble when it’s good!

Christopher

Another good topic, Camille Dungy. Thinking on the question forces me to an admission: I honestly don’t know if dreaming influences my writing style, at least when it comes to poetry, prose poetry, and poetic prose. Somewhat to my surprise I realize I am okay with not knowing. Especially, since, the two activities, in my view, are two species belonging to the same genus and therefore related. The first condition of both is that they are pre-conscious activities whose procedural rule is associative thinking. While Aristotle might be my first authority on the associative nature of poetry, recent thinking in neurobiology pretty much holds that the first condition of language itself amounts to associative thinking. In effect, the first condition of poetry could be said to amount to dreaming-awake, right? Which brings up a further question. To what degree does a poet’s poetry influence how she dreams? Do poets dream differently from other people, or, at least, more frequently so? And if so are we now talking about a kind of feed back system getting started up between dreaming and poetry, poetry and dreaming? Danged if I know the answer(s).

Terreson

Often a poem idea that I’ve been playing with in daytime appears as or in a dream, and more often than not it’s the right metaphor for what I was trying to express, communicating it playfully and obliquely and out of left field. The dream makes it live, provides a solution. Who said that ‘a problem can’t be solved by the level of consciousness which created it’? Once awake, the conscious editing process can begin whereupon I slough the dream placenta off the salvaged language. It feels a little bit like diving. There’s nothing hokey in having a creative relationship with one’s sleeping self, if it floats your dreamboat and fits into your writing process. Like ears, eyes never really close, and that’s OK.

I, too, had a dream recently where I was yelling at my father.

As Poe reminds us, dreams can be waking ones:

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him, with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

Our nightly dreams, (like the Raven,) are visitors from the land of non-dream.

Dreams are a visitation of the real, a message from an ‘unhappy master’ (ourselves, the tragedy of real life).

I suppose the poet’s role is to be that visitor, be the dream itself. Let others dream. The poet (with his poems) IS the dream.

I don’t have nightmares, or, I don’t remember them; my dreams are usually very pleasant, dreamy. Nice dream. Be dreamy, please.

Thomas

Another weird thing…a friend just this week returned from France and was showing me some pictures. One was of Notre Dame taken from the Place Saint-Michelle. In the foreground is my favorite café, the very spot where I wrote this poem so long ago. Funny how things come together.

Similarly, Bobby says his experience is exactly the opposite of mine, and when he’s writing well he remembers his dreams more constructively (”more frequently and vividly” he says).

I think it comes down to what the poem one is writing is about, and what one values most in the experience of writing that poem. I’m an old man, and what I value most is the indescribable peace that comes over me when I feel fulfilled in anything I’m doing. If I’m working on a poem I feel really close to, that I feel is honest, brave and helpful, whatever the topic, positive or negative, clear or unclear, I feel more at ease in myself. The result can be, at its very best, that wonderful dreamless sleep that one wakes from a far better, more observant, more flexible person.

Ask yourselves what you value most as you write, and I think you’ll see that you get what what you think you need.

Christopher

Newly Divorced

.
Can you dream me, baby, while
you’re sleeping in New York’s night?
Catch my thought transmission?
Can you feel me in your REM
at 8am in France, drinking
hot coffee on a cold day?

The leaves are falling here
and the sun seems barely up.
Can you dream me here
in Paris, writing you
a poem?

.
Copyright 2005 – Evolving-Poems 1965-2005, Gary B. Fitzgerald
Copyright 2006 – Specimens-Selected Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald