My poem and image about dreams, 'It is said', have just been published in the latest edition of the outstanding arts magazine Steel Jackdaw (pages 39 and 40):
It is said that dreams are never new
but are created out of memories no longer loved,
recollections that must be discarded as oddments
to make room for the latest events:
despite the despair you felt for so long in your job, you persistently
dream that you go back, your desk bursting with unsolvable
tasks, toxic air around your office space, grey corridors
conducive to nowhere, unfeeling colleagues
It is said that in dreams most narratives take place where you used to live, always
the same house though with a different façade and outlandish
rooms, surrounded by people you are supposed to know but
have never seen before:
my dead father dying once again as if this time it could be avoided, my dead
mother telling me the funniest jokes which in life she
was never good at, my dear dead friends claiming they are upset
that they were taken away well before me
It is said, by way of explanation, that dreams are accounts of recent experiences
blending randomly with excerpts from earlier tales. And when awake,
you cannot but interpret them, marvelling at the imagery and trying
to unravel the plotlines, as you would with any good book:
interminable tube lines taking you to places from which there is no
return, leaving behind stations with ludicrous names, more so
as the train proceeds: muddled letters, puzzling words, threatening messages
telling you that the end can happen any time soon
It is said that in your dreams you will climb steep buildings with no harness
and no net, descend into total darkness without any source of light, relive
the saddest episodes as joyful stories and the comedic as tragic,
experience the fantastical and envision the impossible:
dreams emulating a life lived in fragments, like cracked mirrors
echoing a shattered self. No, there was not enough time to dream
for too long or too convincingly. And yet dreams are the only possession
of ours that will survive, it is said
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