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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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I would say that the opposite is true: our mode of writing influences our dream style. Were it otherwise, poets and writers might never be awake! “Sorry, the Poet is sleeping now…”
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I love the Surrealists’ explorations of dream, have dawdled for many happy hours over the likes of Jung & Freud, and sometimes correlate Geoffrey Hill-style the ability to write with chemical adjustments to one’s brain and mental health – but I don’t think science quite bears out a belief in the reified “unconscious” (though whatever lives in the noggin helps invent dreams, poems, lies, wishes, moralizing, good and bad behavior, and other creative epiphenomena).

I might as well reference the infamous Poetry essay, “The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time,” by Frederick Turner & Ernst Poppel, which you can read here.
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A couple of choice stabs: “we must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb (Lolita); “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.” (Speak, Memory).

But I’ve often wondered as well how much dreams have to do with our writing habits. I tend to take the Freudian side over the Nabokovian. Like you, I dream in sequenced stories, often ones that resolve problems that can’t be resolved during the day; translation problems, poetic solutions, etc. Bill Knott has a great line on this: “I have sleep to do. I have work to dream.”

Like a lot of writers, my dreams are very visual and very language intensive at the same time. They are also polyglot. When I dream about my wife, we speak in Portuguese, since we never speak in English when we’re awake. The other night I had a dream about my parents (in English). But I had a poodle with me, and the poodle we speaking in French, and wanted to know if she was speaking to quickly for me, and I assured her, in French, that she was not.

Martin
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Dreams in our time are a sort of psychic spill-over, a waste like a wet dream. In my experience, dreams have only been really useful psychologically when I’ve been in analysis, satisfying both my need for meaning and my analyst’s need to have something to reveal to me the next morning (which is what all the money is about—no blame). Indeed, I almost never dream ‘psychological’ dreams when I’m not in analysis–which means I don’t most of the time.

My Thai wife, Homprang, doesn’t dream ‘psychological’ dreams either, but rather ghosts and the future—as did the prophets and still do shamans all over the world. Because psychoanalysis never put a stop to the old magic of dreams, a power which has served human beings so well.

I mean, what else could the little Aborigine do on the Walkabout but dream? How else could he navigate? How else could the little hunter survive in the Kalahari desert?

But here’s my real point. Great poems are much greater than modern dreams, it seems to me, because they are distillations, not distortions, fulfillments, not wish-fulfillments.

And as to me personally, I can’t read a poem through that doesn’t do something like that for me—which is why I read so few poems today. Actually I read quite a lot of poems everyday, I just don’t read very many all the way through to the end, what is more more more than once.

Fortunately, I don’t have to teach them or discuss them in workshops, and there are no poetry cocktail parties in my neck of the woods, or talk shows. Otherwise I’d have to read a whole lot of poems whether I wanted to or not—or lose my job and my clout. Otherwise I’d have to pretend.

Christopher
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My mom would mention to me that she always dreamed in black & white. And she had read somewhere most people dream that way. I can never imagine only remembering a dream as a color — it is usually weird for me not to remember a dream. Specific images, specific events. I move around a lot in my sleep, talk a lot — my dreams are intense. But they’re fun. Just the other night I dreamt I was a ninja running through a mansion fighting friends and ex-friends, and my sword was called ‘Flash Fiction’.

A few nights before that, I dreamt I was an X-man fighting an epic battle in New York. Before that, I was trapped in a house with the Devil, and I kept waking up in the dream, thinking I was awake, only I wasn’t. Then the water started rising like The Great Flood, until it subsided and it turned out I was outside with a bunch of believers and all the non-believers were inside the house. Only I began doubting whether I was really being saved by God or if this was another Devil-trick. (strange thing is, I am not a hardline religious person, although I am very, very spiritual).

I usually dream in stories. I also dream the future (I am not joking), so the majority of my dreams tend to be reality based. I have never turned my dreams into poems, but this cannot be said with an assertiveness. I believe some of the dreams have crept into the work… I write screenplays and am a very visual person; my dreams represent that.

What I have found I am able to do, is think about what I want to dream about, then dream it. If I want to work on a project (usually a script or short story), I will think about it before I go to sleep, then solve it there. Poems… I am not sure… I don’t think of them in terms of solving while sleep. Poems are more central. And will always work beneath the surface, without need for me to ‘focus’ them, I guess. They are always there.

So Freud came to the conclusion that dreams were latent desires, or compacted, repressed issues. Supposedly, the general community after Freud disagrees and believes it is mostly the brain stem flowing images into the cortex, and trying to make sense of the barrage. It’s a combination of all those things Freud and everyone else said. Plus more beyond what we can easily categorize…

Oh, and I always dream in color.

* side note: Can anyone else do the following: before I have gone to sleep, I will repeat the time I want to wake up, again and again, in my head. I will continue doing this until before I feel myself falling asleep, then I’ll stop. The next day, I will wake up within 2 or 4 minutes of the time I wanted.
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I’m forgetting many of the details, but I read an account by a Jungian analyst about an analysand trying to play a trick on him. For months the analysand would recount his dreams — then during one session he announced something along the lines of “Hah, hah, I fooled you. Those weren’t my dreams. I just made them up and you were none the wise!”

The analysand thought himself quite clever — until the analyst went through the “fake dreams” and showed him it really didn’t matter. It’s all the same psyche — and it’ll speak via dreams, daydreams, fantasies, obsessions, anxieties and most certainly our poems and stories.

Reb
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As for me, I seem to operate like Antonio Porchia: “When I am asleep I dream what I dream when I am awake. It’s a continuous dream.” If only my continuous dream produced writing as fine as his!
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