The Dream as a Portal: A Creative Poetry Project
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Date
2022
Authors
Comstock, Jenna
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Dreaming, which is described by psychologist Sigmund Freud as “visual thinking,” is something we do with our minds alone, while our bodies are asleep. Writing with a dream as subject material demands an acute precision when transferring details from the mind to the page, because the images and ideas dreams hold are by nature fleeting. In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, the dreamer is also the speaker in the second book, The Purgatory. He receives the dream as if it were a direct message from God. Contemporary poet Jorge Luis Borges has written work which is a meditation on Dante Alighieri’s notion of the dream and has also written work which interrogates his own dream landscape intensively. Poets Reginald Shepherd and Maxine Scates also interrogate what Borges calls “the territory of dream” or the landscape of a dream (Borges 109), in a way that brings the dream state into conversation with the speaker’s experience of reality. Borges, Scates, and Shepherd all describe conversations and experiences with the dead in these dream poems. The dream territory for these poets holds common threads: doors, the notion of hiding and being seen, and accessing dream by a body of water, and for each of them the dream state acts as a portal or a vehicle to question ideas and images. My own poetry seeks to examine how the dream state, specifically its elements of movement and time, can serve as a catalyst to describe the fleeting.
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Keywords
dream, poetry, death, portal, time