Dear friends,
Years ago, I had a dream. I suppose it initially felt like a nightmare, but now it’s not anymore. In the dream, I was being condemned to a cave. Some boss had sent me there, like an imprisonment. The cave was at the bottom of a hill, and as I walked there, I passed friends. They looked, but couldn’t help me.
At the opening to the cave, I stopped. Inside, I somehow knew, was a chasm of fire. I knew that if I ever entered, I’d never leave. I walked into the cave.
Then I woke up. Lordy.
It’s a Jungian’s fantasy, that dream: a peculiar playground of archetypes and shapes. Caves have featured in my dreams for years.
I don’t know a lot about the interpretation of dreams, and I always think of how the French writer Hélène Cixous wrote that she didn’t so much want to interpret a dream, rather than cough it up. Still, it was such an arresting dream that I did want to have a conversation with it. One of the things Jung proposes — and not only Jung — is that everything in the dream is a part of the dreamer. So rather than me thinking it was a dream about the boss I had then, or the friends, the dream is creative tableau where parts of me fracture to become their own selves, to inhabit their voice: the cave, the chasm, the absent but powerful boss, the Pádraig, the friends, the fire — all are parts of me. The hope is, I suppose, to help them say what they want or need to say. And then to think of how to respond. The dream might be the unconscious mind’s artistry through representation.
Anyway, all of this is to continue the conversation we started last week, the you that you can use to speak to you. You chose such moving archetypes to speak: an older self speaking to a younger; a known speaking to a stranger; a playful speaking to a weary; a delighted self speaking life to a despairing one. Each with their own intelligences and wisdoms, and the great nothing in between.
The dreams we have, the fantasies, the dramatic conversations when nobody else is watching: they each are ways of the self speaking to the self. In a poem, too: there’s a speaker, which isn’t quite a full representation of the poet, rather it’s a slice of the poet, an independent bit of them speaking back. The speaking voice in a poem can be like the dream voice of the self, operating on its own insight and motivations and curiosity. They’re tender, these dreams of ours. I am cautious of ever thinking a dream only means one thing too, certainly that one I’ve had has traveled with me for twenty years, and I return to it now, finding new conversations. I’ve always loved the last few lines of W.B. Yeats’ short poem “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”:
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
So, the question for this week is,
What’s a dream you’ve been in conversation with?
I don’t mean a dream as in a goal, or an objective, or a desire. I mean a dream that visited you when you slept. You don’t need to give us too much of it, just a sentence or two. I’ll look forward to meeting the plural yous that are present in the fragments of your dreams.
Pádraig
Poetry in the world
The Poetry of War and Peace
A Fireside Chat on Identity and Inclusion
I look forward to this discussion coming up on February 3 with Amanda Ripley, the Washington Post columnist and author (her most recent book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out). We’ll be reflecting on how poetry and language can capture the destruction of conflict, as well as how the arts can help build peace. I’d love to see you there, in person or online, at 10am ET. Sign up here.
Ada Limón & Krista Tippett
If you’re in Minneapolis this Thursday, the University of Minnesota is hosting a live recording of On Being, and our team would love to see you there. Krista will be in conversation with Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate and friend to Poetry Unbound. Get your tickets here to join us in person or online on January 26 at 7pm CT.
Feed the Beast
I’m hosting several online and in-person events around a book of my own poems published earlier this month called Feed the Beast. You’re most welcome. It’d be a delight to spot a few of you from this Substack community.
— January 26 at 6pm GMT (London/Dublin) on Zoom and in conversation with Dante Micheaux.
— January 26 at 7:30pm ET (4:30pm Pacific; 5:30pm Mountain; 6:30pm Central) also on Zoom and in conversation with Ellen Bass.
— February 9 at 7pm ET in Manhattan at McNally Jackson (4 Fulton Street, NYC 10038). I’ll be in conversation with the brilliant Maya C. Popa. Registration will be up soon, but you can also just turn up.
See you there, for poetry and chat.
The Langston Hughes poem, The Dream Keeper, was engraved on a large glass panel in the lobby of a building I lived in at one time. It was a delight to read it each time I entered. It too, has the message to treat dreams gently/with care.
The Dream Keeper, Langston Hughes
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
My early recurring dreams were always of encroaching waters, not waves, but tides. But over more recent years since our big-boned cuddly, sweetly expressive but non-verbal son (with Fragile X Syndrome who cannot tell you his name or address) was born, my dreams are of losing sight of him in a crowd, waking in great relief, never having found him in sleep. Terrifying. I suppose these dreams are conversations for me about the anxiety of loss of pieces of myself and loss at the very heart of life.