you who have made bright things from shadows

Today in creative writing seminar we talked about dreams, mainly trying to figure out what they are, how they work. It was pretty interesting. I didn't manage to directly get a poem out of it, but I have something that I can easily turn into a poem. I couldn't manage to get anything down for the actual main exercise, but I can work on that.

Our first topic of discussion was about trying to describe dreams. We each wrote down a description of what dreaming is, addressed to some being from a place without sleep, and therefore without dreams. Most people listed some stuff, but I was feeling more prosaic and wrote this:

You close your eyes and the body stops, you lose control of your senses and lie as still as a breathing corpse. And then the visions, dreams: fantastic adventures or terrifying chases full of discontinuity and preconceptions, alternate realities completely unfamiliar, or created from hopes for the future and regrets from the past, but always glossy and displaced; a thread that may be similar to those woven into your waking life, but destined to fade into ash as soon as you regain your sight.

Other people said things along the lines of altered conciousness, surreal visions, fleeting senses, unfamiliar territory, like being in a film. Our next task was to try and make rules for dreams, I guess trying to define what they are. I didn't manage to write down what we decided on our five were (due to lack of sleep, actually. I was rather zoned out this morning), but here are the three I managed to write down:

Rules of Dreaming:
1. Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness.
2. While the events in dreams may mirror those of reality, they are all constructed fantasy.
3. Dream time has no correlation to real time.

Someone mentioned lucid dreaming, and the film Waking Life, a film about dreams which talks extensively about lucid dreams. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching. I might track down a copy and watch it this week just for a refresher. Been a few years.

Alongside all of this, we looked at some poems about dreams which are really interesting:

Beale Street
Langston Hughes

The dream is vague
And all confused
With dice and women
And jazz and booze.

The dream if vague,
Without a name,
Yet warm and wavering
And sharp as flame.

The loss
Of the dream
Leaves nothing
The same.


Birds Appearing In A Dream
Michael Collier

One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,
another a tail of color-coded wires.
One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,
another a flicker with a wounded head.

All flew like leaves fluttering to escape,
bright, circulating in burning air,
and all returned when the air is cleared.
One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,

deep in the ground, miles from water.
Everything is real and everything isn't.
Some had names and some didn't.
Named and nameless shapes of birds,

at night my hand can touch your feathers
and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,
you who have made bright things from shadows,
you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.


The Song in the Dream
Saskia Hamilton

The song itself had hinges. The clasp of the eighteenth-century Bible
had hinges, which creaked; when you released the catch,
the book would sigh and expand.

The song was of two wholes joined by hinges,
and I was worried about the joining, the spaces between
the joints, the weight of each side straining them.


Now I'm off to have some dreams of my own. I have more stuff to do tomorrow.