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Dream recall made simple
After chatting with a friend about dreams, I thought it might be a good time to revisit a post from my old blog, maria cristina. I wrote this in July, 2007.
The main way to remember your dreams is to use the power of suggestion. If you say to yourself before you go to sleep, ” I’m very serious about remembering my dreams,” or something like that, eventually you’ll remember. At first you might only remember a fragment, but that’s fine. Write down the fragment. Think about the image. Ask yourself what associations you have with it.
Eventually you’ll remember more, until you find yourself recalling four of five dreams a night, maybe even more than you can handle. All you have to do is repeat your intention to yourself and keep a notebook and pen next to your bed.
I go through periods when I try to connect with my creative mind, usually in an effort to understand myself better. Before I go to sleep I say to myself, ‘ I would really like to remember my dreams tonight’. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I scratch a few words down in a spiral notebook, hoping to retrieve the whole dream in the morning. I’ve been working on my dreams off and on for many years. Has it paid off? Do I have a deeper understanding of my life? It’s hard to say, because the dreams keep changing, and so do I. I can say that for a moment, a remembered dream brings me a sense of fulfillment.
My dreams open a window into a mysterious world. When I’m able to draw that world into my daytime life, the wonder of it amazes me. I record the varied scenes and plots that gather over time: a dog comes loping out of a lake, I sail with a hundred ships on the open sea, a wild woman dances the cumbia, and emerald green insects crawl over my washing machine.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and the door is closed. The dreamscape is hidden. If I’m patient, the images will surface during the day. While taking a long walk a memory will pop into my mind, until I remember the entire dream by the time I’m home. It’s like taking a tapestry out of a dark closet and hanging it on the wall.
Freud wrote that all dreams are wishes or fears. Carl Jung spoke about archetypes and the collective unconscious. Their theories interest me and help me, but I rely on my own interpretations. The metaphors and symbols are personal. Usually, if I record the dream and let it simmer inside, my own meaning bubbles up. It’s a way of keeping my ear to the ground of my unconscious.
The images that come to me in the night might lead me down a path of enlightenment. Maybe I’ll bring what I find back from my sleep, and show it to others. Will I create a poem? Will I write a story? Or will I dream the dream of divine love?
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Connections
When my son Freeboarder told me I was a ‘computer beast,’ I felt like Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away when he yells on the beach, “I have made fire.”
Freeboarder was psyched because after struggling with loading Windows on his iMac, we finally achieved internet connection on the Windows side of his hard drive. The saga involved four trips to the computer store, stops at Subway for supplies in the way of food, three lengthy conversation with ATT, and a snowfall.
In Atlanta snow is a big deal. We were in the thick of computer hell when I looked up from the monitor and said, “hey, it’s snowing!”
“I know. It has been for almost twenty minutes,” he said, deadpan.
We were both exhausted from talking to technicians and installing software, and the snow stayed in the periphery. We read in one of his manuals a step he had left out, so finally the problem was solved. Today he can play Warhammer on his iMac, and he’s happy.
Last night my husband and I watched Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie. It’s about a mother who is treated with terrible cruelty by the police after she reports the disappearance of her nine-year-old son. John Malkovich plays the part of a Presbyterian minister who befriends the mother and helps her in her dealings with the police. The movie, set in the late twenties, shows what little power women had then. Jolie deserves her Oscar nomination for the role – she played the part of the mother very convincingly. Of course it doesn’t hurt that she looks like Helen of Troy.
After the movie I went downstairs to say goodnight to Freeboarder, and gave him three big hugs and a kiss on the cheek. After watching a mother’s agony over losing her child, I felt particularly grateful to see my own son with his eyes glued to the computer screen. And he suffered the hugs with magnanimity, sweet kid.
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A Bop for Read Write Poem
Crow Angel
Their calls rip through the air after they’ve gone.
I’ve pieced together an opera cloak
from their fallen feathers,
lined it with clouds and swathes
of midnight sky. I fly by your window.
Can you hear my cries?Days when birds abandon trees
I comb the grass for feathers.
My cloak is black as a vanished star,
You’ll see me from afar, above a crowded
opera house, soaring
in time with Exsultate, Jubilate.
Voices lift me to a ceiling
as frothy white as a wedding cake.
It is shining with the tears
of all the arias.
Days when birds abandon trees
I comb the grass for feathers.Crows flap their wings in my chest.
I twirl in the space above you,
my torso a treble clef,
my legs quarter notes, darker than soot.
Join me in this shadow dance,
my cloak is large enough for two,
but if you doubt me, I’ll gather
some feathers for you – on those days
when birds abandon trees, I’ll comb the grass, for you.***
The prompt this week at Read write Poem is to write a bop using donated lines as the refrain. My refrain comes from Jillypoet. Birds are a leitmotif in many of Jill’s poems, and I thank her for sharing her perspective on them with me.
By the way, Jill has two new poems up at Mannequin Envy.
*Alleluja – Exsultate, Jubilate is an aria by Mozart. If you haven’t heard Kathleen Battle sing it, listen here.
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Fun stuff
I can make babies fly Instead of taking a nap yesterday, I decided to make a collage. I found my envelope of pictures, leafed through a few magazines, found some more pictures, and then assembled them on a makeshift canvas I had already prepared, made from an empty cereal box.
For some reason I thought of a poem I wrote last year while I was cutting pictures out. The babies caught my eye, so I went back to my old blog and found the poem, which I then doctored up a bit.
I’m not overly excited about my finished results, but it was fun to do. Maybe the poem needs the collage, and the collage needs the poem. However I look at the end result, the process is just as important, maybe even more so, to my well-being as a poet, and as a dreamer. It’s important to honor the dream energy by paying it forward, by doing something with the dream images in waking life. At least it is to me.
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I Can Make My Babies Fly
In dreams I have babies,
though in waking life
I’m done with birthing.I bathe them in milk,
rinse their pillowed bodies
at the sink.Sometimes a herd of bison
will tear through barbed wire
as if to trample us.I try to outrun
the bellowing beasts
infants in arms,but everywhere I turn
I’m hemmed in –
chain-link fences,rivers, spider webs, tall waves,
there’s no option.
If I want the babies to live,I need to rise up on tiptoes,
hold them high in the sky,
and lift them over the barriers.
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Donate some lines of poetry to a good cause
Calling all generous poets! We’re doing a collaborative prompt at Read Write Poem this week, and we’re asking people to donate two lines of poetry for others to use as a springboard to write a poem.
The instructions are to use the donated lines as the refrain of a bop, whose form I wrote about a few days ago. So check out the prompt, donate two lines, and grab two for yourselves. It’s nice to share the inspiration.
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This poem breaks my heart
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.— Robert Frost
This poem breaks my heart. I thought of it today because the first forsythia shrubs are in bloom, and I’ve seen some daffodils and crocuses making their way out of the earth. Nothing gold can stay.
My husband is from New England, Robert Frost’s birthplace, and studied Frost’s poems in school. This poem has always been his favorite, and he has it memorized. But even though the lines grab a hold of me, a part of me wants to rebel against the meaning. It’s the same part of me that rebels against my husband’s more realistic view of life. And realistic really isn’t the word. I don’t want to say pessimistic or negative either. But his world view is less hopeful than mine.
Maybe that’s because I quit my teaching job and he’s still slugging it out in corporate America every day. That battle can take the wind out of anyone’s sails. But what gives me hope is not the idea that the gold really can stay. I know the forsythias will lose their buttery petals. The daffodils will brown.
The reason I accept the dying of the things around me has to do with the nature of my inner life. Like most people, I have days when taking the dog out yet again seems like an insurmountable chore, when I ask myself if I can bear to fold one more load of laundry. And it gets worse. Even if nothing bad has happened I’ll start imagining possible tragedies, like my husband having a car accident driving home on the highway in the rain. I’ll work myself into a frenzy of fear.
But that’s where my hope lies. If nothing gold can stay, nothing shriveled and wretched stays either. The dying of the gold gives us hope that our garbage may one day flower. Of course this acceptance is a daily one. Each day I find my edge, and try to balance there.
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My room with a view
I’m not a nature lover, which is not to say that I don’t love the outdoors, I’m just not a transcendentalist sort of person, having grown up in the suburbs, close to a large city. Haiku, with layers of meaning based on observations of the natural world, don’t interest me. Maybe that makes me shallow, but it’s the truth.
That said, right now I’m looking out the window of my writing room (slash guest room, storage closet, and yoga room) at the bare branches of the tulip poplar beyond the neighbor’s house, and can see a red-tailed hawk high above the roof tops. We are both at our perches, looking around. It’s a thrill to see this animal in its environment, peaceful yet primed to find its next meal – a little squirrel or chipmunk digging for acorns.
There’s a hawk’s nest in my backyard too, about fifty feet up. I can judge the height from the time I did one of those team-building exercises which involved climbing forty feet up a tree trunk. We climbed on metal rungs that had been hammered into the trunk, and then inched our way across a metal cable suspended between two trees. There were ropes hanging from another cable every five feet or so. The object was to cross to the other side by walking across the cable, grabbing onto the ropes.
What I learned that day was not to look down. The PE coach (it was a teacher training weekend) kept yelling, “Keep your eyes on the next rope!”
The analogy is to apply the lesson to life, as in goal setting. Instead of being afraid of failing, continue envisioning the end result.
The hawk is still placidly surveying the the gray morning.
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Update: My column is up at read write poem. Go read about the bop!
Balanced On the Edge 