A Poet’s Muse, Dreams, Free Association, and Making Something of It

All poets dream, but it could also be said that not all poets consciously use their dreams to create their poetry. However, it is safe to figure that dreams are never quite lost on a poet. Upon awakening from a drug-induced sleep, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2007) began to write down the seminal “Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream” in 1797: “I still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet…all the rest has passed away like the images on the surface of a stream” (p. 216).

Some poets directly attribute a poem as a product of dreaming, while others speak of the inherent poetic nature of dream life. Edgar Allan Poe (1969) in his “A Dream Within a Dream” etched the significance of his nightmarish dreamlife:

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? (Poe, 1969, p. 130)

The dream is a visual thing, an experience thing, an otherworldly thing that speaks in metaphor, symbols, feelings, and conundrums. For Freud, the remembered dream hid from the truth, a “disguise” he called it. Yet Carl Jung (1970) saw something else, writing

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“(manifest dream) is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious” (p. 281). Perhaps both Freud and Jung are correct. Poems, as well as dreams, can do both things: reveal as well as cover up or misdirect. Take, for example, a love poem or a loving dream: both can be created by a broken heart.

But to what degree does the telling of a dream, along with Freud’s innovation of free association, represent poetic invention? Or at least a precursor to it? Cleanth Brooks (1947) instructs us that “The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality…it is an ‘imitation’ -by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience” (p. 194). What if we substituted “dream” for “poem” in Brooks’ analysis? That would fit well with Freud’s notion of how dreams are built on “day residue.”

Of all literary endeavors, poetry may be the closest idiom to a remembered dream and its associations. From Shakespeare to Kerouac, poets frequently reference their dream life. A poet’s dream often serves as an elemental source of inspiration—in other words, a muse. Of all 20^th century writers, John Berryman’s award-winning 77 Dream Songs (1964) directly links the stream of consciousness-confessional-associational dream process with the creation of poetry. Consider the last stanza of his “Dream Song 76 (Henry’s Confession)”:

I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
—I saw nobody coming, so I went instead. (Berryman, 1969, p. 76)

Like a dream, Berryman’s words flow through the images—a “handkerchief,” a “beautiful sea,” a mysterious presence of another—one detail collapsing into the next. It’s the language of a dream where time, location, and objects swim in an ambiguous jumble, drifting without context yet rich with texture, living in a place we can easily recognize.

The words are arranged on the poet’s page, forming mind-shapes and mind-textures both familiar and strange. The words juxtapose on a page as a seduction, a confrontation, a revelation, an

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insight, an invitation, and even a resignation. In Ferlinghetti’s (1958) jazz-infused beat masterpiece A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, he riffs:

and there would be no fires burning
in the hellish holes below
in which I might have stepped
nor any altars in the sky except
fountains of imagination. (Ferlinghetti, 1958, p. 28)

The words on the page are written by a stranger, yet that stranger knows or captures a feeling and/or idea as the reader knows of, or had known, but has now forgotten. Often, the side effect of someone knowing what one is experiencing creates a feeling of being less (in a sense) alone. It could be said all poetry is designed to make us feel less alone, even if the poetry is about loneliness in T. S. Eliot’s (1915) “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. (Eliot, 1976, p. 7)

Although Eliot’s imagery seems personal, idiosyncratic, and miniature, the passage speaks volumes to the devastating grief of fading youth, physical decline, and the loss of sexual desirability as one ages. In a way, Eliot’s poem could pass for a reported dream. In dreamwork, Freud called this condensation and symbolism, whereby each element carries with it the weight of memory and a subtext of a living history.

Even if the author is only writing for her/himself or burns the papers before they can be read (as Freud had done with his early writing), the poet always writes the verse (even unconsciously) with the reader in mind. Poetry is a correspondence of the poet’s heart/mind/conscious/unconscious to the mind/heart/conscious/unconscious of another. Even if the poet claims they are not interested in being read, the poetry is always for another to read, even beyond the poet’s death.

As with poetry, dreams are built from within. If remembered, the dream images enter the conscious mind and are described in the form of language. The dream tells a story through a personal “poetic” descriptive invention. The associations that follow extend

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the dream to deeper meanings. A young woman dreamt of being “held hostage by a scary man” who, upon association, reflected the struggle she had with separating from her close-knit family, always feeling the need for protection from the outside world. Simultaneously, the man represented her fear of her own sexual desire that she could not express while living with her parents.

As mentioned before, poems, in a broad sense, may articulate a common feeling, creating a sense of connection. In the associative space of dream analysis, the patient fearlessly opens the dream up and, in so doing, there is a communion of sorts between the patient and the analyst. In this light, the dream, like a poem, becomes a medium of exchange and connection. A patient once told me she had a repetitive dream that a “devil, with black eyes, was in my kitchen, and I whispered a prayer.” Upon remembering and describing the dream, she recalled, to her surprise, a scene of sexual assault she had long ago forgotten. Through symbolism and metaphor, she recaptured poetically the precise sense of evil and powerlessness that had consumed her early home life so many years ago. The dream came from the “fountain” of her imagination, which unknowingly bridged into her childhood memory and in so doing brought the dreamer closer to the analytic relationship. “I never told anyone this before,” she remarked.

In psychoanalysis, dreams are a starting point for free association or a stream of consciousness, which in my view is merely another word for poetry. At the very least, the telling of a dream is a poetic expression, and if done courageously, free association could also offer more poetry. Perhaps free association is the wellspring of most if not all poetry. A poet makes something of an experience, as the dreamer makes something out of “day residue,” as Freud called it. I would be remiss to forget the intense effort a true poet makes to find the precise words, unlike the free associative process, which is always an unstudied random thing, sometimes requiring little effort.

A poem carries a dual nature: It is both an ending and a beginning, like a dream. The poet as well as the dreamer quickly seizes the moment and re-describes the day residue in a foreign yet familiar tongue. Words begin to shape and contain this experience, this frozen moment; it is a snapshot, a film, a love letter, a suicide note, and an emancipation proclamation. The moment is documented in the poet’s mind and reimagined on the page as words, as a dream reveals in its second revision and elaboration, unfolding in

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a session with (hopefully) reckless abandon.

Freud’s dream book could be called the “interpretation of private poetry.” Dreams in the psychoanalytic realm are metaphors and similes, verses to an epic but obscure memory-driven poem. Like poetry, dreams test the limits of the listener to get their meaning, just as a child tests the boundaries of a parent. Dreams and poetry are as free as a bird and as caged as any wild creature. They are naturally disruptive and surprisingly calming. They push and pull us; both can be as light as a summer breeze and as hateful as the cruelest truth. They are all things, no one thing.

As Philip Larkin (1974) reminds us about childhood, parents, and perhaps the best case for psychoanalysis in his “This be the Verse”:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. (Larkin, 1974, p. 431)

It is here, in the recesses of despair, rage, reflection, and the freedom to choose all the words we can conceive, that a poet makes a stand and has something to say that grabs our attention, like a dream that bursts through our wall of forgetting. The cry of loss, the vengeance of memory, a clever rhyme, a punch to the gut, and a sad farewell, poetry and free association are a human thing. No other animal understands it, not our dog or cat or raccoon on the porch. It is only for us to play with, to muse with, what we make of it, and hopefully, learn from it.

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