Tag: dream interpretation

Interrogating a dream and finding a poem (Literary Work)




Ethereal boy,
you would kill me with a feather
fine-sharpened to a point,
intended for my heart,
and you would call it art.

Dreams as Fertile Fields of Meaning
This poem, like many of my writings, came from a dream. In the dream, an artist acquaintance from overseas comes to visit me, spending only a brief time with me in O’Hare airport. Then he wanders off. I later read an interview with him in a snippet of newspaper that says that he planned to approach me for a film, which explained the brief interlude. It also said he considered, for the same movie, throwing a feather, quill sharpened into a dart, at my back, and if it killed me, it would be art.

Dreams are symbolic, so I woke up doubting that said acquaintance had any desire to kill me, nor could he kill me with a quill pen. As that was what he described the murder weapon as.

Gestalt Dream Analysis
Because I found the dream poetically compelling, I interrogated it using Gestalt methods, which basically instruct the dreamer to tell the story from the viewpoint of all the major people and objects: 

  • Me: You know my part.
  • The artist: I play with images, I play with image. I play this scene with you, and I will not tell you why. I could stab you with this feather; fear not, it’s all illusion.
  • The feather: I am a pen; from me ideas flow. I am an arrow; Cupid does not miss. 
  • The paper: There are no secrets. I announce success
  • The airport: I am the place where people cross, where people greet and part, the resting place between journeys.
What Does It Mean?
This dream is too complex to define linearly, so maybe I can put in place themes that don’t necessarily contradict each other:
  • The journey: my journey of being a writer
  • The artist: my inspiration/an established artist/personification of mischief/Cupid
  • Cupid: ludus (crush energy) as vehicle for inspiration
  • Brief interlude: a surprise
  • The newspaper: He’s arrived; I have not. Also, an implication that I have importance, but as a abstract concept
  • Feather pen as weapon: Cupid’s arrow, creativity, ludicrousness (see ludus); vague sexual reference but lazily so
In conclusion:
That was fun! If I had to guess, I’d say this poem is about the nature of inspiration and our muses. Ludus, sex, death are all tools of the writer, and of the artist. 

Have you ever used a dream as inspiration for one of your works? Let me know in the comments or at lleachie@gmail.com

Getting Practical about Dreams

Dreams don’t work the way I want them to.

For the last couple nights, I’ve been dreaming that I got picked up by a major publisher, and I felt light and strong and perhaps even validated.

Unfortunately, I know why the dreams occurred, and it wasn’t because of precognition. I’d been working all weekend in moulage, and that’s a very visible thing to be working on, and I got a lot of compliments on it. That translated in my dreams to getting recognition in my other life. 

Dreams pick up little fragments of real life and sort them out in a peculiar way. I’ve read that we don’t dream of anything we haven’t encountered in real life. From my experiences, I don’t believe that unless I’ve been in a large underground city whose corridors walled in white glossy formica, accessible by a basement door in an old hunting lodge with a kitchen with avocado appliances. 

I interpret my dreams, usually by a Gestalt method, telling the story from the viewpoint of each significant object (human or non) in the dream. What happened in the interpretation of the dream of the hunting lodge became the first draft of my first novel, the one I struggle to re-edit, Gaia’s Hands.

The dream of getting published is easier to interpret: I want to get published. I figure it will be as satisfying as moulaging. I can’t wait to get started.