Dream-Compelled Narration
Dreams and poetry share a bond that transcends the constraints of reality. With a free and open mind, we can better receive the influence of our untapped creative potential. The physical world has many barriers that detach us from having full access to the ethereal. Particularly within a capitalist society where we are obligated to fulfill expected “dreams” or goals that do not invigorate us spiritually. Left in the rubble of that, we seek comfort in the realms that are just passed the real and tangible physical world—that of dreams.
I am the first to attest that when I am exhausted, I feel full of creative ideas. Like a flame near extinguishing, I reach for what little space, what little oxygen, is left around me, and gravitate towards that. It’s like the last moment of brain functioning before an inevitable death. Culturally, we can look to many acclaimed writers for their approach to the realm of sleep and creativity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream” after waking from a dream. According to Coleridge, he wrote lines of the poem that came to him in a dream only to be interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock.” Eventually this phrase for an unwelcome visitor is now an allusion to something that disrupts creativity. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson are said to be products of dreams. Outside of the realm of literature, the painter Salvador Dali would intentionally wake himself mid-dream to record what he was dreaming onto his canvas.
There is a documented positive correlation between attaining full REM sleep and one’s creative process. However, much is attained in the action of grasping at straws—whatever this might mean figuratively—we also are gifted with a sort of creative desperation when under the knife of insomnia and lack of rest.
In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard once professed that poetry “is created through co-operation between real and the unreal.” That is, both through the subconscious mind and our creative mind the images of our consciousness come to bear fruit. To see everything in the stark reality of the physical conscious world would be much too cold for the warmth needed for creation. We must also investigate our subconscious. This frees us up for complete inspiration. In a similar vein, to rely completely on the subconscious would be a fool’s effort. A certain layer of logic must be presented to make art completely sufficient. Of course, this is a controversial idea, one that I do not hold onto with great complexity: I am open to changing my mind. No one is right about art all the time and that is part of the adventure of it.
Frank O’Hara also explored the relationship between dreams and poetry in Meditations in an Emergency. Within the poem “Ode,” he describes his longing for another person to be as vast as the sea: “I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence and sometimes, returning, I become the sea–in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.” We can envision how the sea acts as a body of water that transports one into a land of dreams, whether while sleeping, or not. Give me the dreams of the sea, give me pleasures like the depths of the ocean, like the depths of the human heart. Another poem from this collection, “Sleeping on the Wing” takes us further into this state of being: “Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness, as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries ‘Sleep! O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!’…The door of dreams, life perpetuated in particolored loves and beautiful lies all in a different language.” There is no need for translation in this realm, all is known intimately. We are freed from the separateness of it all.
Dreams encompass so much more than just the act of entering REM. Dreams include daydreaming and meditation, anything that takes us out of the rush of the modern chaotic physical world and into that of the ethereal. Meditation has been used to expand consciousness for thousands of years. In the Bhagavad Gita, the subject of the mind and mediation are elaborated with intricate poetry: “Quietness of mind, silence, loving-kindness…this is the harmony of the mind.” Perhaps that is where the true magic of sleep and dreams take place–in the quiet. In the deprivation of the senses, one can see with the mind’s eye images not accessible when conscious, words not attainable.
In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard also hails daydreaming as a doorway, a threshold into ulterior consciousness. He emphasizes the “flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected.” Both what is experienced tangibly and intangibly are important to creative work. If dreams act as a filter for the mind to process the day fully, it makes sense to then incorporate them into our art, our writing. To catch some of the sensory details that could truly make work great, instead of having it fall by the wayside, lost to time.
Art this way becomes powerful because it comes out of something we are not in control of. It comes out of almost the primitive darkness of soul and mind, something that exists inside us all. This is the realm of creativity I wish to explore the most, that which finds home in the darkness. And in revealing itself, is the most tender of all.
It is difficult, if not near impossible, to have the time needed in stillness and space to create. Frequently, it can feel that we do not have enough time to be creative, and especially surrounded by a culture that values efficiency most of all, it can be hard to justify pursuits that do not increase monetary wealth. The same thing can be said for getting enough sleep and taking our dream life seriously. It was not that long ago that communities supported the idea of the prophet within all, hidden under the blanket of sleep. Similar realms include that of daydreaming and meditation. When we listen to our intuition, heed our dreams, and allow our senses to roam outside of the tangible world, that is when we can access our full creativity.
