Here is the seventh question in the 9 for 9 project, and of course my response.
Have your sleeping dreams ever influenced your poems? And/Or, have you ever dreamt that you were writing a poem? If so, did you remember any of the lines after waking? If so, can you please share?
Sometime around 1980, I was visiting Bill Mohr down in Los Angeles when he asked me how come, if I included everything plus the kitchen sink in my poetry, there was so very little evidence of dream imagery in a work like Ketjak. I mumbled something about not remembering my dreams, but that answer was more a means of side-stepping the question than anything else. I wasn’t remembering my dreams precisely because I was using alcohol as a mechanism for “getting past” my chronic insomnia. The same glass of wine or three that was helping me to unwind each evening was functionally suppressing whatever interactions I might have with the dream world.
It had been the reaction of my dreams to my initial exposure of working with American prisoners – the recognition, really, that the sadism of Abu Ghraib was as American as apple pie & about as common – that had triggered the pattern in the first place. The group I was working with, the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ), had been founded to support a wrongful death suit at San Quentin regarding a man by the name of Fred Billingslea who’d been having a psychotic episode in a his isolation cell. Tear gas was fired into his cell, the canister hitting him in the throat. With Billingslea now unconscious & unresponsive, he was taken to the prison hospital by being dragged by his feet down several flights of metal & concrete stairs, his head hitting every step. Within a month of my arrival, another prisoner with whom we were working was beheaded by a fluorescent lightbulb used as a sword by another prisoner. Events like this were commonplace – I mean that literally – but I quickly learned that I couldn’t even talk about these things to my new roommates in the Haight – the details were too lurid. But holding that in turned my dream world into something from Brueghel or Bosch.
In December, 1984, a good seven years after I stopped working fulltime in the prison movement, I stopped drinking. A few months later – and it literally did take months – I began to notice dreams for the first time in over twelve years. In order to confront this more directly, I began a practice of writing poetry as soon as I woke up, really before the phenomenal world of day had taken over. At least two sections of The Alphabet– “Hidden” and “Ink” – were written almost entirely this way. Both also confront the two most problematic relationships of my life, the first with my father, who abandoned my family when I was two, the second with my grandmother who helped to raise me while struggling with mental illness. That connection wasn’t intentional &, until this paragraph, I’d never really thought of it in those terms. Since those two pieces, it’s been less programmatic, but every once in a while a sentence shows up fully formed in sleep that will make it into whatever I’m writing at the moment.
As Kerouac & others have known & noted,writing at the instant of waking is a process that, carried on daily, will actually help you to remember more and more of your dreams. Carried out on a regular basis, it sometimes amazes me what shows up – why, for example, did I wake this morning with the tones of Cher singing, literally, Half Breed in my sleep? Just thinking about this question has helped to bring this week’s dreams to the fore.
Related to the idea of remembering & using one’s dreams in one’s writing, is learning to be aware in the dream itself, lucid dreaming as I believe it’s called. Like taking a feature that seems to show up in a number of dreams – a door that one fears will open, for example – and trying consciously to be aware of the door the next time it shows up so that you can open it yourself to see what lies behind.
I find that I don’t so much dream that I’m writing as I do dream that I’m discovering a journal or manuscript that is already written – there is that old poet’s formulation, “I am given to write,” rather than “I write.” When I find passages, sometimes ideas for whole poems – and a poem in my case can easily take a year or two to bring to completion – in my dreams, it’s these journals & scraps of calligraphic vellum I’m bringing forward.
