IN DREAMS BEGIN POEMS

During private study with Clayton Eshleman in the early 70s, my friend Sylvia Rosen (Dreaming the Poem: a dream journal, Red Wind, 1994) became intrigued with Kilton Stewart’s Senoi Dream Theory, practiced by an obscure Malaysian people. This led her to Patricia Garfield’s Creative Dreaming. Inspired by the poetic potential she sensed in these matters, later controversial, Sylvia studied with Stewart’s widow, Clara Stewart Flagg at Everywoman’s Village in Van Nuys, California. Over twenty-odd years, whenever we discussed our writings, we also discussed her delvings into a process Sylvia called “dreaming the poem,” as well as the more complex “redreaming.” (Disturbingly, this overlapped with Nightmare on Elm Street.) In my teens, I had spent library time on Carl Jung’s writings. This was different. As I recall, Sylvia kept a bedside journal, a very old idea, but something my urban-jungle lifestyle ruled out. However, like Sylvia, I was a constant and intense dreamer, to the extent that I often felt that I lived an alternative life—in vivid color, sometimes as exhausted upon waking as I had been the night before. I might be haunted by a dream for hours, days. When at the typewriter, I began contemplating how one might structure poems from particularly vivid dreams. It seemed a simple but elusive idea, if deliciously surreal. I finally made it work. Looking back, though, whenever I did succeed at turning dream stuff into poems, my efforts seem to have corresponded to those talks with Sylvia, back in the day.