In a dream we were required to select our favorite poems for submission to something, and so of course I feverishly combed through books and reminisced fondly and savored all of those words in the same way I do anything else delicious. I woke amused and ran through the poems I had been dreaming about, only to discover that while the usual suspects where there most of what I had been reading didn't actually exist. What are these poems, living written only inside my sleeping brain, and who writes them? Probably they are communications from the other me who lives just on the far side of where this me is, codes to a place that slips from my fingers as soon as I wake up.
In any case I of course went researching to see what the meaning is in dreaming about poetry, which turns out to lead in delightful research circles of poems about dreaming. The most pervasive of these is Dreams by Langston Hughes, which I encountered as a child around the sixth grade in the first book of poetry I bought for myself. We have talked about the poems in this book before, but one of the best things about it is that it specialized in the kind of poems that are easily memorized and fill the cracks in a person before they even know that they're there. My copy of that book is all cracked and stained, but then so am I, and anyway we have made it through all of these years together. The best thing about poems is how you grow to fit them.
Which, the more I think about it, may just be the sort of circles the other me was leading this me in. Of all the circles I've been in lately, anyway, this is certainly not the worst.
In any case I of course went researching to see what the meaning is in dreaming about poetry, which turns out to lead in delightful research circles of poems about dreaming. The most pervasive of these is Dreams by Langston Hughes, which I encountered as a child around the sixth grade in the first book of poetry I bought for myself. We have talked about the poems in this book before, but one of the best things about it is that it specialized in the kind of poems that are easily memorized and fill the cracks in a person before they even know that they're there. My copy of that book is all cracked and stained, but then so am I, and anyway we have made it through all of these years together. The best thing about poems is how you grow to fit them.
Which, the more I think about it, may just be the sort of circles the other me was leading this me in. Of all the circles I've been in lately, anyway, this is certainly not the worst.
1 comment:
Oh, you're a poet. That explains things.
Um, I dream writing too. Although I dream myself actually writing, and writing the most wonderful words, some of which I can even remember in the morning.
Of course, this is before my alarm, so I'll go back to sleep, doubling down, in search of even more wonderful words, and I'll get the usual:
In the last semester of my senior year in college, taking four courses in order to graduate, a week from the end of the semester, I realize that I've only attended three -- for the whole semester. I've completely forgotten about Blah Blah History 302. I will fail and not graduate. How disappointed everyone will be in me.
And then I'll wake up panicked and forget everything I wrote in the earlier dream.
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