Dream Verse
I always keep a pen and some paper beside my bed in case I wake up remembering a dream - they vanish so fast, and I like to think about them if I can.
Sometimes, strangely, I dream in verse. Not poetry - it's never good enough to be what I'd call poetry - but rhyming verse. Provided I can get to the paper fast enough I can write it straight down.
Sometimes it's just a fragment:
To the blue sky - and away!
Another sulky sultry summer's day.
Very, very occasionally it's more than a fragment. Once I woke up dreaming I was trying to push past a lot of people down the aisle of a cinema, and immediately wrote this down:
Always I had the feeling
Of hanging around at the back
Of standing behind the others
Always I felt the lack
Now I am moving forwards
Sidling down the side
The aisle is rather narrow
And I am rather wide
But what will I do in the morning
When I finally reach the front?
A realisation is dawning
I don't really know, to be blunt.
Hardly subtle, and it did ring rather true with me when I thought about it - but how strange that my subconscious mind should invent the whole thing in my sleep (I quite like the line "sidling down the side".)
It's true, I suppose, that it's the same mind that I use when awake and I have always found that writing rhyming verse comes easily to me. If you give me a rhyme scheme and a fixed number of lines (such as a sonnet) then I can generally come up with something reasonably pleasing, but not profound.
Great poetry is harder. I can't seem to do it when awake (well, I don't try much, in case it's rubbish) and I don't seem to do it when asleep either, which is a shame.
And now I'm off to Barrow-in-Furness and some Cumbrian hills and beaches, so my next post will be on Sunday evening. I hope you have a good weekend.
Sometimes, strangely, I dream in verse. Not poetry - it's never good enough to be what I'd call poetry - but rhyming verse. Provided I can get to the paper fast enough I can write it straight down.
Sometimes it's just a fragment:
To the blue sky - and away!
Another sulky sultry summer's day.
Very, very occasionally it's more than a fragment. Once I woke up dreaming I was trying to push past a lot of people down the aisle of a cinema, and immediately wrote this down:
Always I had the feeling
Of hanging around at the back
Of standing behind the others
Always I felt the lack
Now I am moving forwards
Sidling down the side
The aisle is rather narrow
And I am rather wide
But what will I do in the morning
When I finally reach the front?
A realisation is dawning
I don't really know, to be blunt.
Hardly subtle, and it did ring rather true with me when I thought about it - but how strange that my subconscious mind should invent the whole thing in my sleep (I quite like the line "sidling down the side".)
It's true, I suppose, that it's the same mind that I use when awake and I have always found that writing rhyming verse comes easily to me. If you give me a rhyme scheme and a fixed number of lines (such as a sonnet) then I can generally come up with something reasonably pleasing, but not profound.
Great poetry is harder. I can't seem to do it when awake (well, I don't try much, in case it's rubbish) and I don't seem to do it when asleep either, which is a shame.
And now I'm off to Barrow-in-Furness and some Cumbrian hills and beaches, so my next post will be on Sunday evening. I hope you have a good weekend.
posted by Daphne at 12:54 pm
1 Comments:
It is amazing what our unconscious mind presents us with whilst asleep. I once dreamt in fluent German. In the waking world my Grandmother escaped from Germany to England in 1940 but I have never spoken a word. It only makes me wonder more and more what lies in that misterious 9 tenths of the brain.
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