thoughts, words, deeds

perchance to dream

Zachary Schomburg's poetry collection Fjords Vol. 1 (Black Ocean, 2012) was inspired by his desire to write poems based on the dreams his friends had shared with him. In an interview for the Pleistocene, he explained that part of his process was "e-mailing my friends or having a beer and talking to them about their most interesting dreams or their most recent dreams, and trying to make poems out of them." The resulting poems have the odd clarity of dream logic.

Have you ever written poetry or stories based on your dreams either your own or friends? Let's discuss dreams a bit. Do you believe writing about yours or someone else's dreams can be beneficial? How reliable do you think dream recall is?

I don’t remember my dreams. Certainly not as images. When I remember my dreams, it’s generally as words—like I was reading them out in my mind. Of course, sometimes that is very image filled and vivid. But because I don’t really remember my dreams, I don’t really write based on them. Sometimes I write things that have been wandering around my head for a while. I have also written scenes and poems that feel dreamish to me, but they are always polished and based on craft, not on memory.

My problem is, in order to feel true, I can’t take the dream wholesale. Both fiction and poetry need more logic than I get from my jumbled memory of dreaming. So, if I write something that is dreamish, it has come from my head through my fingers in a conscious stream, although that stream may have less structure than most of what I write.

I don’t know if writing dreams is beneficial. I don’t write as a form of therapy. I write because I have to. Because of that, whether a particular subject is beneficial feels irrelevant. I mean, I write some funny and some sad and some weird, but the point is, I’m not writing to get things out of me. I’m writing to entertain and because the voices in my head need out.

I have found that even if I try to recall a dream, I don’t. Like I wake up with a nightmare, and I’m sure I’m going to remember it and five minutes later, I don’t. Maybe that’s just me. But I can’t speak to anyone else’s recall.