A poem inspired by dreams: By Jennie Meyer
In a strange city I hold a crying woman.
There are gashes all over the mine field.
Night raptors slide silently over
as we lie by the surging mill river.
A buried bluebird darts from the dirt
of her childhood wasteland.
I walk with her through town, find her
home, investigate in her basement.
She uncovers a basket of paints, brushes,
tattered paper in her kitchen. We begin again—
our paints swirl together into a holograph
of the universe. We accelerate toward
the astounding mango sky, into the mouth
of the Goddess. Back at her table,
on the paper, we find only one sketch— Avatar
to both of us: a woman in simple brown dress.
While a student of the Institute for Dream Studies, I took a supplemental writing and
dreams workshop with our teacher, Tzivia Gover, called “Dreaming on the Page,”
available through her website.
Tzivia taught us a new way to write with dreams: to go through your notebook and write down the dream titles as lines in your poem. I find that dreams, over the course of several weeks, will often follow a similar theme, and revisit figures that carry a similar message. This poem contains eight poem titles, and some extra details from several of the dreams. Dream figures are usually aspects of ourselves. I enjoyed tending to these parts of me through the process of dream poetry. At the end, our journey condenses into a singular avatar— power rooted in the earthly and ordinary.