Dream poetry

Does anyone else have a hard time trying to convert dreams to poetry? I’ve been having some vivid and particularly strange dreams lately, the sort that feel as if they should provide good fuel for writing, but whenever I try to shape them into stanzas they fall flat. I’ve been recalling my most surreal, poignant, and beautiful dreams and have realized that, though I may have tried, none of them made for very good poetry.

I’m starting to thing that poetry, at least for me, is better for catching the little grains of absurdity in day to day life rather than straddling the veritable sea of the stuff encountered when deep in REM sleep. It’s the same when trying to describe my dreams to friends, unless they’re especially saccharine ones, it’s hard to convey the huge amounts of emotion I feel over such seemingly nonsensical experiences.

A few months back I did experience a pleasing anomaly within a dream (I love those dreams that plunge even deeper into madness), I had a character recite a little bit of poetry within it. I think the dream took place at some ultra avant-garde sort of underground theater performance, and one of the actors got a little poetic all the sudden. I don’t remember the poem, except for the word “Giant” and the phrase “at the end of the block” being in it. I woke up from the dream sort of proud, thinking that dreaming poetry, good or not, really made me a poet in the waking world.

I’m curious to hear if any of you guys have managed to get some good writing out of your dreams, and if you have any tips for doing so. In the meantime I’m sure I’ll keep trying and failing to make good poems out of my dreams, and I’ll definitely keep jonesing for the next appearance of poetry in my dreams. Maybe I’ll have better luck getting published in dream land?

One Reply to “Dream poetry”

  1. You wanna talk about dreams? Let me tell you something about my dreams:

    My dreams are the fucking worst.

    I am so envious of your poet dream. I truly hope that you get a few good poems out of your dreams (and I do recommend writing them down, because they fade fast if you’re not paying attention), but my dreams are just horror stories. Lots of suicides (graphic af), a fair amount of sexual assault (which I don’t even have a real schema for), my ONE AND ONLY PHOBIA coming into play when I’m most anxious…Ya know how sometimes, you wake up from a dream where you’re falling, and you actually feel like you’re falling? Well, I had one like that, except instead of falling, I was PUNCHED IN THE FACE! What kind of horror poetry am I supposed to write from this shit?

    I hope your subconscious is kinder to you. Good luck with this endeavor.

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