DREAMS
All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.
In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine
if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,
and not an easy one—
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions—
birds that come and go,
the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.
Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots
and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense
of loss—a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer—
only how it feels
when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.
– Mary Oliver
I’d never imagined hearing music in dreams…that would be amazing. I keep a notebook by my bedside table to jot down ideas and images that come at night.
Hey Michele, I know! Isn’t that fabulous? I would love to wake up from some musical interlude.
I woke the other morning because someone was whispering something in my ear and I knew it was extremely portent and yet all I heard was the first part of the sentence. I couldn’t make out the last words and I knew it was a huge revelation and then…I woke up! Argh.
Talk about undelivered messages.
Sounds like a writer’s dream – definitely. I hear songs that are new music with tunes and words that I know so well, yet realize I cannot take them into the day – they are my dream tunes – similar to the letters in the dream above cannot be formed into words.
Maybe I need to try writing music and these tunes will write themselves! Is that how writing a novel feels?
Hi Karen, it hadn’t occurred to me that it was a writer’s dream at all. I just thought everybody had that type of experience. I picked this Mary Oliver poem because I felt she summed it up so well; that wispy-slipping away of possible answers or key thoughts just as I wake.
But now, hearing you talk about dream-music in the same way, well, there ya go, I had no idea. I love hearing another perspective. Thank you!
As far as how writing a novel feels, I’ve had very little experience with it, though I did get going a few years ago on one, and I was amazed at what came out of the ether.
And yes, it sort of felt like being able to sit quietly enough that I could tug some of those dreamy-words onto the page. It’s all so fabulously strange and wonderful.