A Moveable Garden

Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.

For days when I’m not inclined to write a poem, I’m offering other people’s dreamy thoughts.

“Writing is dreaming. I only discovered that a couple of years ago. It is lucid dreaming — the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the conscious, just enough to harness the dream’s waywardness. I always heard it said that writing draws on the subconscious, but that isn’t true. It is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious. 

“In the dream, the subconscious finds ways to articulate, dramatise, embody things that have happened in our waking life, things that are weighing on us, feelings, fears, and desires. The dream is startlingly creative and expressive in doing this; it never fumbles for a metaphor, it never struggles for detail, it never labours over the unnecessary. It realises the ineffable. I dream relatively often that I’m swimming in a pool that contains only an inch of water. Even when I realise it has only an inch of water — a realisation that takes longer than it reasonably should — I carry on swimming. When I capture the feeling of this dream it is something intimately known to me — a complex but specific compression of many feelings that I can’t articulate, something to do with futility, despair, tenacity, and which no other metaphor could capture as perfectly If I were writing and I were looking for a metaphor for that exact admixture of those exact feelings in those proportions, I would seize upon that metaphor and be glad of it. 

“So it is, Some days I write, and what I write comes straight up and out of the subconscious without the conscious mind’s interference. All that sediment, some of it gold or gold-ish, pours through the words.”

p, 134-135 The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (2020), by Samantha Harvey