Why It's So Difficult to Write about Dreams

Many great works of literature have been inspired by dreams, or dream-like visions. Two of my favorites are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” and Gabriela Mistral’s “The Flower of Air,” (“La Flor de aire”) just to name a couple. There are great poems and works of prose that recount dreams, but in general, for me, most pieces of creative writing based closely on actual dreams fail to recreate the magic that the vision had for the writer. Why?

Self-portrait collage by André Breton

I’ll give you an example. A couple of nights ago I went to sleep with the thought on my mind that I wanted to write something about dreams. I had a long and often interrupted dream that I kept returning to, a dream that concerned writing. There was a phrase that I and the other characters in the dream kept repeating: “Kicking the wall so hard, the paint falls.” I remember someone, maybe me, actually kicking a door in the dream, and chips of red paint breaking off of it. This phrase and action were supposed to summarize in a nutshell all the great teachings of an important literary figure, someone who was my mentor in the dream.

Well, I don’t think you’ll be surprised that when I woke up, that phrase turned out not to be as profound or as earth shattering as it seemed in my dream. In fact, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. It has something to do with anger—the kicking—and anger as a force for change, or at least for damaging the status quo.

The difficulty in conveying the depth and urgency of a dream to a reader is that the dream seems to supply its own highly charged message and saturated color. When the dreamer recounts the action and tries to depict that aura for a reader, it rarely has quite the same profundity or significance. It’s like having a conversation where one person has the light behind them, and sees the other person in all dimensions and in full color, while the other person is looking into the light, and sees only a vague outline of the person they are talking to. The dreamer sees the dream clearly, with all its perspective and vibrancy, while the reader only sees a silhouette and is irritated at having to try to make out all the obscure details.

There are times when dreams can be the basis of good literature, but this sometimes works best when the writer is aware that dreams are notoriously unreliable in their claims of depth. I’m thinking, for instance, of the surrealist André Breton’s prose poems entitled “Five Dreams” from his book Earthlight, which I co-translated with Bill Zavatsky. Even though Breton was one of the first writers to offer a blow-by-blow description of his dreams as literature, he seemed to know intuitively that dreams were by nature best recounted with a grain of salt. Here’s an excerpt from the fourth of his “Five Dreams”:

“A part of my morning had been spent conjugating a new tense of the verb to be—because a new tense of the verb to be had just been invented. In the course of the afternoon I had written an article that, as far as I can remember, I found shallow but fairly brilliant. A little later I went back to work on a novel I was writing. This last enterprise had led me to do some research in my library. This soon led to the discovery of a work in octavo, composed of several volumes, that I didn’t know I owned. I opened one of them at random. The book claimed to be a philosophical treatise, but in one section, instead of Logic or Ethics, the heading read: Enigmatic. The text completely escapes me, I have only the memory of illustrations invariably rep­resenting an eccle­siastical or mythological character in the middle of an immense waxed room that looked like the Apollo Gallery [in the Versailles Palace].”

Breton is recounting a dream that almost has the quality of a revelation: he discovers a new tense of the verb to be and a mysterious lost treatise on philosophy. But he still is not willing to make any claim of profundity for his revelations—he finds his own article “shallow but fairly brilliant.” And the new volume of philosophy is called, fittingly, Enigmatic, and offers not universal pronouncements but only strange illustrations. The truths we come upon in dreams may be lightning bolts, Breton seems to be saying, but appreciate the irony and humor in the reality that the more they claim to be extremely profound, the more they give us mostly puzzles.
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Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

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How Our Writing Trails Along After Us

Most writers get excited about the work we’re doing right at the moment. That work usually feels like the most urgent, authentic, and developed. Our previous work often seems to us out of date, sophomoric, passé, even at times something we would like to forget or walk away from.

The writer André Breton, in his “Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto” of Surrealism, distanced himself so much from his earlier writing that he proclaimed, “Those [books] attributed to me do not seem to me to exercise any greater influence on me than many others…” Our earlier works sometimes seem to us as if another person wrote them, a person much less wise than we are now.

But the reality of the writing world is that it can take years, sometimes decades, to get a work published and publicized. When I worked with the poet Bill Zavatsky on translating André Breton’s principle collection of poetry, Earthlight, it took me and Bill seventeen years from the time we first sat down at a café on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village to begin the project, till we finally held a printed copy of the book in our hands. There were many reasons for this long gestation period—our personal lives intervened; it was difficult to get the rights from Breton’s French publisher; Bill moved to Texas for two years, making it impossible for us to meet (this was before Skype and email).

We usually have to edit and submit and publicize older work that feels like it’s not our most mature. It’s as if our writings are younger siblings trailing along after us, embarrassing us with their lack of grown-up knowledge and behavior. Sometimes we wish those juvenile writing would just get lost and leave us to our more urbane current work. But, like younger brothers and sisters, they won’t. They keep following us, wanting our attention.

So, give them that attention. While the less-current work you are sending out, or publishing, or reading from may not seem that fresh to you, remember that it’s new to your readers or audience. When you read from your recently published but not recently written work, inhabit again the emotions and ideas that sparked it. Open up to that hurt and laughter. If you devoted that much time and energy to write them, those earlier works must still have a claim on you, and their energy and innocence might even be able to teach something to your more sophisticated current self.

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Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

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How to Be an American Writer