I have found that dreams provide a fertile source of inspiration for poems. Often, I will write my morning sonnet as a simple recounting of the dream I woke with that morning. That way, I release two birds from one cage: I make an entry into my dream journal and I write my daily sonnet. For example, a dream my subconscious crafted for me to bring in to show my psychotherapist:
New Ease
I recalled trying on a pair of shoes
in dream last night as I bent this morning
over my toes and clipped the horny nails,
warped according to the exigencies
of feet surrounded by socks and boxed in
shoes the majority of my waking.
The shoes, textured like my therapist’s new
couch – microsuede – and even the same light
flesh color – fit my feet comfortably
as I eased into them, a bit bigger
than what I had been wearing, tied the thin
laces, and, if I’m not making this up
now, I stood and walked off with easy strides.
And why not? That dream’s over; I can move now!
I won’t go into the interpretation that came up in our subsequent session, but suffice it to say that some element of me – perhaps Mercury, both psychopomp and trickster? – planted all sorts of Freudian and post-Freudian images in it to allow for a whole sequence of associations! However, often I wake without any dream images in my conscious mind. Certainly in those instances I can simply write about what’s on the surface of things, like the light coming through the skylight into my bathtub, the plastic clock ticking on the shelf below the medicine cabinet, but sometimes I find those motifs a bit well-worn. What about writing a poem about not being able to remember a dream?
Okay, I have a whole genre of poems about not being able to remember a dream. Here is the earliest of them, written I think when I was in grad school in the late '70s:
Between the melody of dream
and the bright, brass chords of waking,
a brief polyphony
occurs, sometimes, for me
in the overlapping. I will seem
to be singing, as I walk down shores
of percussion beating, in a voice
not my own, or perhaps in a forest
clearing, a dew-plucked web
will be harping the wind at the ebb
of night, or the new sun’s moist
lips of the grasses whistling.
This chorus
is scattered, the web’s fabric
ripped by the savage buzz-saw
of alarm-clocks, the day’s
inevitable rhythm begins. "Stay"
I plead briefly "sweet, unimaginable music!"
Then I forget it.
It is the law.
Then there are the dreams that I don't remember, but when I'm in my bath, I have a fleeting glimpse of one image, so I start with that, and sometimes I get a little into the dream from that:
Dream Lit by Darkness
This morning, I remembered dreaming, not
the dream itself. Okay, an image: light
from a window at dusk casts the objects
on the table in shadow. Blocks of dark
blue are a lighter shade of blue on top;
the lines between light and dark blue are sharp.
Something has already happened, boxes
packed for three of us to take with us. Where?
Someone in the house says to one of us,
Oh, are you one of the ones who're going?
He wants her to do something for him there.
Where? We have been hefting cardboard boxes
filled with objects gathering more darkness
for us to ferry out into the dusk.
And then there are those mornings when I don't even have an image, but something like the door to my bedroom having been closed is obviously a sign that at one point I must have been dreaming SOMETHING that prompted me to close the door:
all in the house
I can’t write a dream poem because I
don’t remember a dream, only that I
woke after a night of uninterrup
ted sleep this morning and I hadn’t closed
my bedroom door so that others in my
house that is uninhabited except
by me wouldn’t see me sprawled out, Noah
sloshed into oblivion, so I’d thought
a dream of subpersonalities all
in the house of Self the literal
truth and acted on it in my semi-
conscious state nor could I recall any
woman I woke in warm wet intimate
embrace with permeate my new morning.
There is a school of neo-Jungians, if I can call them that, which holds that there is no absolute essence of a dream, no urtext that is the ultimate version, from which all others are, in some way, variants. This school suggests that, rather than a dream being a "message" encrypted in archetypal – or other – symbols, a dream is a narrative that one can enter at any point and follow it, asking questions of images, opening doorways left shut in the actual dream itself, then going down those passageways as well.
Why not take this interactive oneirism in a poem?
Don Riggs studied myth as an undergraduate, the Middle Ages as a grad student (MA, PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill), taught French on the college level, worked as a massage therapist in a holistic health center, and has been teaching English in various places for the last decade and a half.