To Dream or be Dreamed? A Poem by Mark Strand
The dreamer’s identity has been a constant instigation to artistic pursuit.
Dreams – and all the fascinating possibilities derived from the human consideration of dreams – have nurtured and, one might almost say, even constituted human history. As a source of wonder, of (self-) knowledge and spiritual and healing practice, dreams always begin with the fall from vigilant consciousness – during the night when we sleep – and end in the morning, at an apparent changing of the guards.
The absence of ego surveillance, or whatever we want to call it, the “participant observation” that we experience in dreams, is not without consequences in the morning when we try to recall where we’ve been and what we’ve seen.
The poet, Mark Strand, (who’s also showed us the cosmic implications of creativity) has captured precisely that feeling of strangeness, of not knowing whether we or someone else has dreamed our dreams. He leads us point by point through a transition that begins with trying to remember a dream and ends, by day, again trying to remember the story.
Dreams
Trying to recall the plot
And characters we dreamed,
What life was like
Before the morning came,
We are seldom satisfied,
And even then
There is no way of knowing
If what we know is true.
Something nameless
Hums us into sleep,
Withdraws, and leaves us in
A place that seems
Always vaguely familiar.
Perhaps it is because
We take the props
And fixtures of our days
With us into the dark,
Assuring ourselves
We are still alive. And yet
Nothing here is certain;
Landscapes merge
With one another, houses
Are never where they should be,
Doors and windows
Sometimes open out
To other doors and windows,
Even the person
Who seems most like ourselves
Cannot be counted on,
For there have been
Too many times when he,
Like everything else, has done
The unexpected.
And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.
Nothing is clear;
We are not ever sure
If the life we live there
Belongs to us.
Each night it is the same;
Just when we’re on the verge
Of catching on,
A sense of our remoteness
Closes in, and the world
So lately seen
Gradually fades from sight.
We wake to find the sleeper
Is ourselves
And the dreamt-of is someone who did
Something we can’t quite put
Our finger on,
But which involved a life
We are always, we feel,
About to discover.
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