Dream Poems

A few nights ago, I dreamed I was with my husband in a concrete house that was suspended, foundation and all, in the air. We seemed to be moving slowly over a body of water. Rather suddenly, the whole thing tipped, like the Tower of Pisa, and angled into the water; soon, we were submerged. My husband said to me, “Watch out!” – and I realized that I was in danger of being pinned under the weight of the sinking house. I managed to follow him out from under the house, and we swam to shore. In my hand was a key, but it was just an outside key, not an inside key. All my writing – journals, poems, essays, everything – was in a sealed box inside the house at the bottom of the ocean. I no longer had access to any of it. I was really upset by this: why hadn't I found other places to house my thoughts?

I was reminded of a series of thematically related dreams I had several years ago.

In the spring of 2007, my writing practice was to record my dreams immediately upon waking and then, later that morning, to turn at least one dream into a poem. After a couple of weeks of this, I started to notice that my dreams were changing: more and more, they were about the creative process.

Here are two dream poems from that time:

Verisimilitude

The author has his wares displayed

at Page 101, a little art gallery downtown

that's set up like an illustrated encyclopedia.

Most of his characters are life-sized men

of monochrome maché doing chest presses

with cardboard dumbbells painted to match,

too big for my house, but I could consider

the smaller, craftier things for sale in the back,

like ceramic toothbrushes and a flower vase

sculpted to look like a train engine, very pink.

What really captivates me is a plate

decorated with red and yellow pear tomatoes

and pea pods so green I want to eat them

even though they're fake -- and look,

see that pile of peas and unshelled peanuts

on the shelf, scattered, come unglued?

The author must have intended this mess

to be a mirror for entropy in the world.

Because I have always longed to own

my very own metaphor, I check its price

and discover that what I have picked up

is an actual peanut, actually just half

an empty husk, those familiar ridges

on the brown outside, and on the flipside,

formerly an inside, those scooped hollows,

each the right size for the tip of my tongue,

and each equally worthless to me

because there is no round-trip ticket

from what's imagined to what's real.

The Critique

Whenever other people's psyches are up for sale

I love to take the tour, trying on every room

for size, savoring the delicious pretense

that I could afford their marble, gilt, and plush.

Your place is lower-budget than most,

all low-ceilinged hallways and musty closets.

I don't want to spend even one night here,

but I follow along as you push open each door

and flip light switches on and off, to no avail.

And then you're gone, and whatever sleeps

under your washing machine comes slithering out.

I'm looking right at it, but all I can see for sure

are the stripes, black and white, writhing:

no snake skin or rat tail or tarantula leg

could match this clown kachina black and white,

this cheap costume stocking stripe, unwinding

on the floor in front of me while I stand

paralyzed, backed up against your flimsy wall.

I can only breathe in, and in, and in again.

I'm choking on my own voice, swallowing

each forsaken thought as if it were a balloon

I could only inflate by speaking it aloud --

And when I escape from here, the sentence

I pull out of my mouth will be a perfect copy

of the unknown creature coiled in your hallway,

each word a stripe, each space a stripe,

this pattern that means precisely nothing

until you tell me how it strikes you.