Poetry as Mutual Dreaming

How images grow in the space between your soul and mine

This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features A. A. Kostas

During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia… — Acts 16:9-10 (NIV)

HERE IS POETRY to me: I take you by the hand and lead you to a quiet spot by a gentle river. We lie on the grass beneath the cool morning sun and our heads touch. But our bodies splay out away from each other, limbs outstretched like roots wedded to the earth.

Dream with me, I say. Or rather, come into my dream. And I breathe the poem and you witness it grow between us, hazy in places, fragmented, with flashes of imagery and sensation. But if I’ve done my job well as a poet, what grows from where our minds meet is a tree, rooted in our separate selves but sprouting from the instant of communication, the moment you experience the words I arranged on the page or screen or spoke aloud to you. You see and feel what I am seeing and feeling, but not like watching a film or viewing a painting, and not even like reading an essay or hearing a story. This is something both subtler and deeper than any other form of sharing experiences or ideas. If done right, the poem enters your subconscious, your spirit, your soul.

Landscape With The Education of Bacchus by Francesco Zuccarell

When I say that poetry is mutual dreaming, I don’t mean some spiritualist seance where we attempt to reach corresponding Jungian symbols through automatic writing and subliminal messaging. We haven’t got time for such parlour tricks, and besides, we’re talking about something far simpler and far richer. Poetry distills the essence of language, recreate the images and sensations that thoroughly affect us. It’s no wonder biblical writers returned again and again to poetry in their attempts to communicate spiritual principles. If you want to lead another person toward deep and arresting truths, and have those truths remain in their hearts, consider poetry.

MY WIFE DOESN’T DREAM, or at least, she doesn’t remember her dreams. Whereas I dream vividly and often, as does the rest of my family. I grew up discussing dreams, and never knew it was considered boring to hear about another’s subconscious sojourns. I was always fascinated to learn the inner workings of a person’s unencumbered mind. “We are only what we are in the dark,” wrote Oswald Chambers, and I’d say that includes our dreams. Asleep we are unguarded, vulnerable and revealed.

I have a recurring dream of watching people I love fall from great heights as I stand near enough to see them, but too far away to act. My toes go numb and I sit upright in bed, my heart racing, as if I were the one who was falling. Now, we could psychoanalyse my responsibility-complex as an eldest brother or interrogate my caffeine consumption on the nights these dreams occur, or we could focus on the strong emotion that the dream-image captures so succinctly. The terror of your family member plunging to their death while you are powerless to do anything but watch— it’s strong enough to jolt me awake in seconds and leave me sleepless for the rest of the night. That is the power of dreams.

I’ve known people with prophetic dreams, who have visions and signs from God as they slumber. There are others who have solved complex life problems or have been given stunning revelations in their dreams. And in scripture, we read of men and women regularly receiving important dreams that change the course of their lives, or of history. The dreams may be symbolic, but they are often didactic, spurring specific action. Pontius Pilate’s wife gets a mention during the trial of Jesus, telling Pilate to “have nothing to do with that innocent man” as she “suffered a great deal in a dream” on his account. We’ll never know exactly what she experienced that night, but we can imagine the soul-shaking horror that haunted her, provoking her to action. Directions and warnings from the Holy Spirit often come in dreams as well.

Through dreams, something deep inside us can shift, clunking into place. Seemingly immutable personal qualities can be transubstantiated. Blood becoming wine becoming blood again. And I think that’s what we’re trying to achieve as poets — here is a dream I had, here is something the Spirit revealed to me, I hope it can affect you in the same way.

AH, BUT THE INHERENT anxiety of sharing our dreams. Do others have the same fantasies and nightmares? Am I alone in these unbidden experiences? Dreams are the manifestation of something deep within, which we merely witness. Call it subconscious, or call it glimpsing a spiritual reality, dreams reveal truths we can only approach blindly.

Somehow, night after night, we enter trance states, like cave-dwelling ascetics or psychedelic hippies. And then, morning after morning, we are left with the lingering imagery and emotions of our time spent in another world, which we rarely have the right words to explain. They are impressionistic, fragmented, emotive. Something is lost in the transmission.

Like with dreams, there is a fear inherent in poetry. The dream-tree I conjured in my poem at the start of this essay is more real to me, more emotive to me, more affecting to me than any physical tree could ever be. But I can’t know if it will affect you in the same way. Will the poem speak to your soul, or will you only see a blurred image, like looking through a mirror darkly?

PERCY SHELLEY THOUGHT that “in the infancy of society, every author is necessarily a poet”, which I think is like saying “poetry is the base layer of language” (yes, very Barfieldian of me). Somehow, complex emotion and sensation can be communicated through the power of the right combination of words, their rhythm and meter pressing into our bloodstream, a few phrases elegantly bridging the gap between individual minds. Maybe because in poetry we find the root of what language is capable of, something foundational to the communion of souls.

But then again, reduction doesn’t necessarily mean simplicity. In the 21st century, we know that the more reduced or microcosmic, the more complex. As we train our microscopes on neutrinos and quarks, classical physics breaks down, and we enter quantum realms where the impossible happens on a regular basis. In nature, so in language. While a good essay explores one idea comprehensively, a good poem somehow contains a whole world in just a few lines. The entirety of faith contained in a mustard seed; the destruction of a city unleashed by splitting a single atom.

What do I mean by a “good” poem? It might anger some people, but I do think there are degrees of quality and there is much bad poetry (I’ve written lots of it). And while we acknowledge that most of us probably aren’t qualified to judge the entire literary canon, we do know a quality poem when we see it. For example:

The Two-headed Calf
by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

Hopefully, we can all agree that this is great stuff, at least in the sense of poetic imagery.

Poetry has two major sources and therefore two major forms — the song and the dream-image. Some poems are lyrical, a pleasant way of arranging words based on the sounds they make in our minds or when read aloud. And some poetry is focused on the communication of images and concepts. Of course, the best poems manage to balance the song and the image whichever way benefits the poem best.

“The Two-headed Calf” is a prime example of dream imagery. We are transported into the world of a newborn “freak of nature”, first seeing the farm and field where he is born, the environment and society he is coming into, then in a twist of dreamworld magic, we are inside the twin brains of the calf, looking through its two pairs of eyes at the doubly beautiful heavens. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking about that calf, destined for the taxidermist, able to survey a double portion of the universe for one brief night. Poems like this leave a lasting impression, but as an image rather than a song. It’s not the sound of the words, but the feelings and pictures they evoke within us.

Contrast this with a verse from poet & songwriter Conor Oberst’s “Cape Canaveral”

And watch the migrants' smoke in the old orange grove
And the red rocket blaze over Cape Canaveral
You've been a father to me, your 1960's speak
Give me comatose joy like re-run TV
While the mountainside was shining wild colors of my destiny
I watched your face age backwards changing shape in my memory
You taught me victory's sweet even deep in the cheap seats.

These words also remain with you, but because of their rhythm and meter. Their sound. “Victory is sweet even deep in the cheap seats” is an excellent example of using assonance and internal rhyme to convey a poignant truth. It gets stuck in your head in a different kind of way than The Two-headed Calf. Like the voice of an angel telling you which path to choose, or the heavens thundering with divine wrath.

LET’S RETURN to the dream-tree, growing from where our heads touch and minds meet. As the poet, I may be the one showing you the tree, pointing out a specific branch or leaf that I want to draw your attention to. But you aren’t compelled to slavishly follow my gaze. In the space left by the poem, the lacuna of the words unwritten, there is room for your dreaming. You are intrigued by the nest in the crook of one limb, or you consider how this tree interacts with the others in the forest. A good poem is like this dream-tree—growing, living, unfolding, multi-faceted. It’s still the tree that I described, but you can see more of it than I realised. More than I saw myself.

With a good poem, there is more agency for the reader. You are not just experiencing my dream, we are co-dreamers in the imagery and rhythms that enter your mind and body. And it turns out the skinny cypress I had been describing was actually a thick-boled oak, with spreading vertiginous branches. You saw the fuller potential of the poem.

To be clear, poetry isn’t abstract art, capable of infinite interpretation. Words do mean something, they are bits of communication. But the beauty of poetry is discovering that words can mean more than what the poet first intended.

Here’s the final example of great poetry, the last three stanzas of this poem, which probably contains more meaning for me than the poet ever intended:

Worm Moon
by Mary Oliver

IV.

Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

V.

Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

VI.

and probably
everything
is possible.

Here, we see both song and image delicately interwoven with Oliver’s love of the natural world, love of humankind, love of God. In a few simple lines, she sends us careening from Genesis to astronauts to baby newts in winter, then finally to considering the smallness of our belief and the perfection of God. It is a profound and difficult thing to pray “and probably everything is possible,”’ but I have discovered much solace in uttering and even believing those words. I acknowledge that those three lines probably mean something different to me than Oliver originally intended. But I have dreamed through this poem, a vine growing on the latticework the poet constructed, and something has grown and flowered within me as a result.

The best works of art, be they poems or paintings or novels or songs, somehow surpass their creators, tapping into deeper currents. And when the poet draws from the wellspring of religious faith, a poem can be immensely powerful while still retaining a certain mystical element in its communication of enduring truths. Just like a dream.

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A.A. Kostas
Poet & Writer

A. A. Kostas is a Canadian-Australian writer and lawyer, currently based in Singapore. His poetry, fiction, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Clayjar Review, The Rialto Books Review, Inkwell (f.k.a. Ekstasis) and Vessels of Light. More of his writing can be found at aakostas.com and by subscribing to his Substack journal.

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