Dream Speak

After a month writing poems exploring my personal mythology, I'm getting back into the rhythm this week of writing my dreams down, and returning to one in particular that I've been working on interpreting. I find doing dream work in short bursts works best for me otherwise I waste energy fighting with procrastination.

Here's a tanka I wrote about dream work for the InkSeeds prompt on Revelation during April's NaPoWriMo - read it here
 
And a poem from the first prompt: Recycling the First Dream - read it here. This was one of my favourite prompts as I again reconnected with the power of dreams and the significance and importance to doing dream work.
 
This is an earlier post about the books I use for dream work and a found poem from one of them - Receive Dreams as Messengers from Another Realm Enjoy!

Found Poem Friday

I haven't written any poems this week, nor done any craft work: my concentration has been on dream work. I am using the four-step approach found in Robert A. Johnson's book Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination for Personal Growth.

• Step One: Associations
• Step Two: Dynamics
• Step Three: Interpretations
• Step Four: Rituals

I have previously done dream work with a Jungian analyst, but this will be the first time I've taken a dream through these four steps at home. It is focused work, demanding of the mind, which wants to wander terribly and do anything but explore the truths that lie in the unconscious.

Jung observed that dreams perform restorative, corrective, compensatory, prophetic, and developmental roles in our psyche; that to attend to our dreams is to attend to the cry of the soul.

The above is from the other book I use in my dream work, The Art of Dreaming: A Creativity Toolbox for Dreamwork by Jill Mellick. And this brings me to Found Poem Friday...

Four and Twenty post a daily prompt on their facebook page and Friday is always found poem day. So, today I wanted to share this found poem I wrote from The Art of Dreaming as it perfectly sums up my week.

Receive Dreams as Messengers from Another Realm

Dreams haunt us.

Their images, words, sounds, feelings.
They disturb, amuse,
intrigue, inspire.
They are messengers
from another realm
with their own logic.

The narrative structure of the soul –
a logic that dispenses
with cause and effect,
exists in a timeless
spatially unbounded universe
where we are allowed
to do the impossible:

occupy two time frames or places at once.

What if we pay attention to our dreams...
Let their images feed our imaginations...

The heart of the dream will beat
in our actions, and lead us onward.

Copyright © Kirsten Cliff
First published in the Bay of Plenty Times 'Poets Corner', Saturday 19 September, 2009