Dreams offer a way into the unconscious.  Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.”

As a poet, I look for symbols and overtones for each image I create, or that my poetic mind creates.  As I have been writing down my dreams every night for nearly two weeks, I have access to better imagery and overtones.

I find myself writing poetry with an ease I haven’t felt since high school.  Easy. light, even breezy and yet the poems are compact and serious.

If I tell myself, as some dream books suggest, that I ask myself if I am dreaming but the day, in order to set myself up for lucid dreaming, the daily activities become still and very beautiful.  Rain on the streetcar rail, as I sit waiting at the stop, the beauty of a single flower and its companion rock in a local garden…. these images are poetic and stimulate that part of me.

I get grateful for each beautiful image, and that gratitude also releases the desire to write poetry.  I do not know whether it will do the same for the novel.  I have written poetry since age seven, so it is over 60 years that I have been writing steadily. It spilled over into writing advertising copy and press releases.  But I have not had it work for the novel.

But I have only been doing dream work for two weeks.

I also have to apologize for writing so rarely.  I have been ill for nearly two months, a bad reaction to a medicine I had to wean off slowly.  So for over a month, I was taking a pill in ever lowering doses, that was making me ill.  I had every bad side reaction to a medicine that helped me for over a year.

One of the side effects was light-headedness, confusion, anxiety and more.   Needless to say, writing under these circumstances is almost impossible.