Everyday Canvas

Dreaming Poetry

Prompt: Zachary Schomburg's poetry collection Fjords Vol. 1 (Black Ocean, 2012) was inspired by his desire to write poems based on the dreams his friends had shared with him. In an interview for the Pleistocene, he explained that part of his process was "e-mailing my friends or having a beer and talking to them about their most interesting dreams or their most recent dreams, and trying to make poems out of them." The resulting poems have the odd clarity of dream logic.
Have you ever written poetry or stories based on your dreams either your own or friends? Let's discuss dreams a bit. Do you believe writing about yours or someone else's dreams can be beneficial? How reliable do you think dream recall is?

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I used to write down my dreams about 30 or so years ago. Then I stopped after several years, not seeing the point in them. Some time ago, when I was looking into that dream note-book, I realized some of those dreams came true later on. One is even scary. I had dreamed of 9/11 and my older son in it, 9 years before 9/11 happened, and my son was really in it, as he was working in downtown NYC, but luckily he came out of it physically unharmed, except for PTSD of some kind. There are other instances, too, but this one was the scariest and the weirdest. I don’t take precognition very seriously, even though I don’t deny it.

I guess writing our dreams can be beneficial for introspection and that was why I was doing it when I was doing it. After a few trying dreams like the one I mentioned above, I decided I'd rather write after I’ve had a couple of cups of coffee in the morning and I am wide awake. But I may have poems on dreams or some such thing. I’ll check and then continue with this entry.

Okay, here’s one I wrote in 2015 after I dreamt I was living in NYC again. First stanza is totally the dream itself, if I recall it correctly. Second stanza has something from my real life in just a couple of lines, so I must have inserted that part to give some meaning to the poem.

Keeping It Molten

Back in the vast city. I’m nowhere and everywhere,
tunnels, canals, tankers, taxis, slums, skyscrapers
webbed, veined, and no skin transparent.
Crooks and junkies in this dark metropolis?
But no, only phantoms smelling of fish
ghosts from a graphic story--singed, somber
and tragically misread—still hiding
in the tenements of my mind.

This city has been a bloody slaughterhouse
littered with noise, and I still writhe
in a corner park, watching
the 59th street bridge with steel biceps
where she once said they met in secret
and broke all circuits inside me, and
voiceless, I screamed underground poetry
to inflame the avenues in my roiled solitude
igniting the Hudson River.