Category Archives: Dreams

Hoarder

10 Replies

Hoarder

There are moments caught between heart-beats that fall into crevasses where they nourish our dreams. Streaming rivulets that escape our conscious daylight world swell these moments until they become full-grown nightly adventures––what we have hoped blended with what else might be possible, tempered by fears and regrets. What part of us orchestrates these dreams has never been discovered––some grand arranger of self that does not allow itself to be controlled by any conscious part of us, perhaps. It is a cinema we construct for ourselves—a relief from or a censor of or a collector of those parts of ourselves we would otherwise not deal with. Those parts of ourselves we struggle to forget and throw away? There is no detritus in our lives. Some great hoarder within us reaches out a hand to capture and arrange them, then calls them dreams.

 

The dVerse Poets Pub prompt today was to write a 144-word flash fiction piece making use of the first sentence in my essay above.

Some Nights

8 Replies

Some Nights

When waking hours grow too late,
ideas begin to percolate.
Chords we’ve found euphonious
may somehow seem erroneous
when we hear their altered streams
filtered through erratic dreams.

Life is made of dreams, we’re told,
but when the dark turns drear and cold,
however oft we’re told we’re chosen,
our potential may be frozen—
all our day-lit grand achievements
turned by night into bereavements.

We lie abandoned in our beds
with nightmares caught within our heads.
What a relief is dawning day
that relieves our need to pay
those ransoms that some dreams demand—
cast not in concrete but in sand.

https://fivedotoh.com/2019/03/06/fowc-with-fandango-percolate/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/your-daily-word-prompt-achievement-march-6-2019/
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/rdp-wednesday-euphonious/

Morning Head Shots

3 Replies

Morning Head Shots

Picture a woman sleeping, words wrapped close around as sheets.
Syllables slipping to the floor, loosed from their midnight feats.
A whole new world evolving as she’s lost away in dream.
All those single actions spilling from the seam
of those reveries she’s wrapped in, meaning more than what they mean.

Click

Picture eyelids opening as light begins to dawn.
See the eyelids close again, her stretching and her yawn.
See the dreams she’s had all night pulled to consciousness–
all tightly wrapped, but wriggling themselves free from all the mess
of what they’ve been bound up in to become what she’ll confess.

Click

See the words all rising from the place where they’ve been sleeping.
See her brow remembering bits it struggles now at keeping.
See her form a paper sheet into a little sack
and use her pen to prod the words back into a pack,
sparring with belligerent phrases that fight back.

Click

See her herding each into its place with little nudges,
overlooking warring words that seek to live their grudges,
making words that don’t belong together somehow fit,
forcing the recalcitrant to want to do their bit
to turn their separate strands into a story finely knit.

Click

Now see the picture on the page where words have come to rest–
stretched out vowel to consonant, best standing next to best.
Brutal words relaxing, flaccid words now showing zest.
Brought recently into the world where they have met the test,
here they stand before you, shaken out and neatly pressed.

Click

Then see the floor around the bed–the words she’s thrown away.
The words that somehow just don’t say what she wants to convey.
See them rising in the air to hover up above.
Words of anger, sadness, envy, honor, lust and love.
They jump, they float, they kiss, they spar, they hug, they joust, they shove.

Click

Tomorrow night they’ll rain back down to form adventures new.
To form themselves into the curious plots that dream parts do.
Picture them assembling into order all their own
or forming groups informally, wherever they are blown.
Ready on the morrow to once more go where they’re sown.

Click.

DSC09955

This poem seemed perfect for Matt’s prompt about the influence of remembering dreams, so here it is again.  It’s been a long time.  Admit it.  You’d forgotten it! Even I’d forgotten, at long last, this poem about the effect of remembering dreams.  Here’s the prompt URL.  Come play along!

For Daily Inklings: Influenced by Dreams

Unraveled

2 Replies

“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”—Wm. Shakespeare

Ravel can mean either to combine thread or to separate it (in linguistics, a word like this is called an auto-antonym). In the sense that it means to combine, unravel developed as a true antonym.—reddit.com

Unraveled

The pain of love unraveling? No one knows it better,
for she wears her heart upon her sleeve, knit into her sweater.
Each day her heart unravels and lies tangled down her arm.
They say it cannot harm her. Loosened hearts cannot do harm.
But she’s a prisoner of these tendrils of love that’s come undone—
the truth of it revealed to her each day by a new sun,
while each night in her dreams, sleep knits it up again
and the ardor of her lost love once more draws her in.
She forgets the present and relives what she once had—
what she imagines in her slumber cancelling out the bad.
This unknitting and reknitting can’t be what life is for.
She must search for her dream’s exit. She must try to find the door.
Cast her old garment on the flames. Burn up that raveled sleeve.
Real love stays firmly knitted. A true love doesn’t leave.

The prompt today is sleeve.

A Dreaming Vocabulary: NaPoWriMo, Apr 14, 2018

14 Replies

A Dreaming Vocabulary

When you’re sleeping soundly in your nightie or pajammers
and you happen to be dreaming of teacups, sharks and hammers,
if the hammer pounds the teacup, spilling tea and cream
to soak the wobbly table that is also in your dream,
you might think good fortune has cruelly run out,
but that still does not explain what the shark’s about.

A dentist in a rowboat comes rowing quickly by.
He fixes that circling shark securely with his eye,
grabs him in a deadlock and pulls him o’er the side,
doses him with novocaine, then just drifts with the tide
as he extracts the teeth that he might use to chew
on anything that he encounters: fish or squid or you!

And just as he is finishing this grisly operation,
the shark begins a session of intense regurgitation.
First a full-grown seagull, then a pink silk ballet slipper
with the ballet dancer still attached, alive but not too chipper.
The shark is still recovering so toothless and so numb it
knows not that if it wants a meal, hereafter, it must gum it.

The whole group now returns to shore. The dancer dances off.
The seagull sits in shock and the shark begins to cough.
A mariachi hits the sand, complete with his guitar.
All of them a bit in shock, wondering where they are.
And to you, caught there  in dreamland, what message does this send?
Perhaps, my dear,  that everything comes out right in the end!

 

The Day 14 prompt is: Pick one (or more) of the following words, and write about what it means to dream of these things: Teacup, Hammer, Seagull, Ballet slipper, Shark, Wobbly table, Dentist, Rowboat.

Released

4 Replies


Released

All night long I follow scripts written by some hand
perhaps belonging to a self that consciousness has banned.
Fresh from dreams, I feel released from tasks committed to
as I remember other jobs that I’m obliged to do.
Who knows if dreams are showing us those things we could have done—
those things we have forgotten with the dawning of the sun.
If only I remembered that world that fades away,
perhaps I’d face a very different sort of day.
Instead, I slip into the role my life has led me to,
like forcing naked feet into a more confining shoe.

 I wonder if these dreams were brought to light if they’d show more
of potential lives where I live closer to my core.
Perhaps these stories I concoct, labelling them as lore,
are simply other lives I live on a lower floor.
When I descend into my dreams, maybe I go to ponder
all those other me’s whose gifts I have chosen to squander.
Could it be in death that I’m released to find a goal
in the bargain basement of the building of my soul—
to find another path where I may once more start a quest
towards a self just one step closer to my very best?

 


The prompt today is release. Once again, I’ve edited and reblogged a poem written three and a half years ago. A fine way to find time to edit and since I never remember these poems, perhaps if you’ve followed my blog for this long, you’ve forgotten them, too.

Special Delivery

6 Replies

Special Delivery

You hide yourself in shadows deep
to watch me as I fall to sleep.
Half-lidded, with your sleepy stare,
you cup my cheek and stroke my hair.
I do not know as I fall deeper
that you stalk this drifting sleeper.

Once I have no power to resist,
you give my hair a painful twist.
I try to jerk awake but fail.
I tense my muscles, fight and flail,
but I cannot escape your grasp.
I call for help. I moan and gasp.

Sir Nightmare, from where do you come
with death knoll beat on ragged drum?
I hear its pulse now through the day.
At every hour, it sounds the way
back to the horror of the night––
a pathway to that final fight

when I will mount at last that steed
that nightly stands to do its deed
to carry to oblivion
this sleeper off to meet her kin—
that father lost, those lovers three
who wait for my delivery.

Is this nightmare just a dream—
a mere digression from the stream
of conscious thought—a nightly swim
through a fantasy most grim,
or a window showing me
an inevitability?

The prompt word today was delivery.

Nightmare

10 Replies

DSC09331

Nightmare

You hide yourself in shadows deep
to watch me as I fall to sleep.
Half-lidded, with your sleepy stare,
you cup my cheek and stroke my hair.
I do not know as I fall deeper
that you stalk this drifting sleeper.

Then just as I do not resist,
you give my hair a painful twist.
I try to jerk awake but fail.
I tense my muscles, fight and flail,
but I cannot escape your grasp.
I call for help, I moan and gasp.

Sir Nightmare, from where do you come
with death knoll beat on ragged drum?
I hear its pulse now through the day.
At every hour, it sounds the way
back to the horror of the night––
a pathway to that final fight

when I will mount at last that steed
that nightly stands to do its deed
to carry to oblivion
this sleeper off to meet her kin.
That father lost, those lovers three
who wait for my delivery.

Is this nightmare just a dream––
a mere digression from the stream
of conscious thought––a nightly swim
through a fantasy most grim,
or a window showing me
an inevitability?

(The photo is intended only as an illustration and has nothing to do with the person pictured!!!)

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/nightmare/

Rope Ladder

5 Replies

Rope Ladder

You call out from the island of your sleep,
each word at first garbled,
as though caught in quicksand.

Beside you in this room,
I waken to your shouted words:
“Is there any window in this room?”

and I am given ingress to your dreams,
even as each new early morning declaration
becomes a strong sure stroke towards your escape from them.

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/island/

Dream World: The Dream That Changed My Entire Life

2 Replies

I have written about dreams so frequently over the past four years, that in place of once again writing about them, I’m going to give you two links. Here is my very favorite dream photo  https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/10/10/dreamy/ (and under the photo on that link, there is another link to my very favorite dream—one that literally changed my entire life.

 

 

 

 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/fairytale/