During the past several months, I’ve been writing poems drawn from dreams. I’m going to describe the process I use.
I suggest to myself before I go to sleep that I will have dreams before waking and will remember them. Then, when i wake from a dream, I immediately try to remember everything I can, any scenes, and reinforce that image and feeling in my mind. I also use a phrase of a few words that refers to something in the dream and repeat that over and over again. (I generally don’t get up and write it down, though sometimes I do). The key is to anchor images and feelings of the dream and connect it to a phrase.
Often, but not always, I’ll then get up, fire up the laptop, and try to summon the dream back. I find that if I can recall some of the dream and concentrate on the images I recall, other parts of the dream will surface as well. It’s important NOT to explain the dream or speculate about what it means, but simply describe it. It’s important to avoid linear thinking. I focus on the feeling and the details I remember. If characters in the dream spoke or thought things, I just report them as it was experienced in the dream. If I can immerse myself in the feeling of the dream, that helps pull in the details.
I find that if I stay true to the dream, the dream coheres and poetry results. I use my regular poetry skills, making judgments about lineation, word choice, etcetera. Some dreams make better poems than others. Regardless, it’s fun and has generated some good poems for me.
