Composing in your dreams

Carl Muller

POETRY: The only great classic of well-authenticated dream poetry (or could it be trance poetry?) is "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge. As is known, Coleridge was in an opium trance when the poem began to swirl slowly, majestically in his head; and then there was a loud knocking on his door. Dragged into reality by his waking mind, Coleridge was never able to finish the poem.

I was a schoolboy when this was told to me by my stand-in English Literature master at Royal College, the late Bevis de Bruin. He was a wonderful man with that rare gift of being able to inspire his students. I have little doubt today that Coleridge's poetic vision was intensified by the opium he had taken, speeding up his intellectual activity.

Funny though .... Bevis, as he was known in Jamaica (he was always Elmo de Bruin to us at Royal)... he went to Jamaica where, at Kingston, he was also honoured for his long years of dedicated teaching.

He died there and only last week I was re-reading the many letters he had written me, and, with sadness I thought of the days of 1950 and 1951 when he would walk into the classroom and of the way he gave to us his vivid and exciting approach to English Literature. He took me back to Thomas Gray, Mark Twain, Stevenson, and among others, Coleridge and Blackmore. Which is why I turn to dream poetry.

Are daydreams dreams of imitation dreams? And how do these lines and images rise in the mind of the dreamer. When Scrooge saw Marley's ghost, he was not asleep but convinced himself that he was and dismissed the apparition as a piece of underdone potato he had eaten!

That's another thing? What has bad digestion got to do with the dream state? But when you read Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, is not some of the dream gibberish of Carroll's "Jabberwocky" the stuff that surfaces in sleep. Again, we see how the familiar classics go awry in Carroll's "You are Old. Father William" and "Sitting on the Gate."

Sense of unease

In Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" the reader begins to feel, even with a sense of unease, that the whole book is a dream.

At one point, Joyce has his sleeping hero imagining himself coming out of a tavern, singing a ballad which, when sung merrily enough with what are most amusing dream lines, they are not unlike the hilarious contortions of Lewis Carroll.

Joyce first sent "Finnegan's Wake" in instalments to a magazine and the ballad appeared in one instalment where the hero - a man named H. C. Earwicker - gives voice to a pitiless expose of himself. Earwicker, we are told, used to think of himself as an carwig when he was feeling low.

Mind you, as the story goes, this is all a part of the hero's dream, but let me give you the ballad as it was first written:

Have you heard of one Humpty
Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and
a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olaga
Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall,
Of the Magazine Wall,
Hump, helmet and all.

He was one time the King of the
Castle
Now he's kicked about like a
rotten old parsnip,
And from Green Street he'll
be sent by order of His Worship
To the penal jail of Mountjoy
To the jail of Mountjoy!
Jail him and joy.

He was father of all schemes for
to bother us
Slow coaches and immaculate
contraceptives for the populace,
Mare's milk for the sick,
Seven dry Sundays a week,
Openair love and religion's
reform,
And religious reform, Hideous
in form....

'Tis sore pity for his innocent
poor children
But look out for his missus
legitimate!
When that frew gets a grip of
old Earwicker
Won't there be earwigs on
the green?
Big earwigs on the green,
The largest one you've
ever seen....

Dream language

Is all this dream language or the creation of a comic art? Or does it belong to that non-sleeping, non-waking category of the pseudo-dream? Yet, if it is an outflowing of the latter, it must be surely unintentional. Swinburne wrote:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears;
Grief withy a glass that ran....

T. S. Eliot has suggested that these lines fall into the pseudo-dream category. As Eliot said: "This is not merely 'music.'

It is effective because it appears to be a tremendous statement, like statements made in our dreams; when we wake up we find that the 'glass that ran' would do better for time than for grief" - (did Swinburne hold the dream of an hourglass in his head?) - "and that the gift of tears would be as appropriately bestowed by grief as by time."

We all know that Swinburne liked his liquor. Was this alcoholic poetry? I knew a man, R. P., who chose to live in a cadjan hut on the banks of the Wellawatte canal. A brilliant man, but he had decided to give up the world and its bug-ridden ways.

He would spend his nights in an alcoholic haze and words would tumble out of him in a marvellous procession of lines which he could never recall the next morning. If delirium can produce pink elephants, why not iridescent poetry? Yet, I suppose if we are thinking of alcoholic poetry, that belongs to its own distinct department.

Dreaming voice

There was AE - someone who always signed himself AE. Some time ago. I chanced on a battered old book in a pavement stall. Poems! and they filled me with a strange sense of unease. It had to be Yeats, I thought. The lines rang like Yeats. They seemed as familiar as all the Yeats I had read, but they were, to say the least, uncanny.

The lines seemed to be suffused by a queer sort of light, making them rather unpleasant in parts and quite meaningless. The poems gave the illusion of a dreaming voice and, for that matter, I felt I was dreaming too. Who was AE? I have not yet been able to find out who he (or is it a she?) is or was. I would be most grateful if a reader would enlighten me.

Of course, it is hard to imagine that AE could have re-composed Yeats in his sleep. That would be most extraordinary. His poems could not be labelled real dream poetry, but has all the makings.

On the other hand, R. D Blackmore, who gave us "Lorna Doone" is reputed to have composed these lines in a dream. They were included in his set of verses titled "Dominus Illuminatio Mea.":

In the hour of death, after this
life's whim,
When the heart beats low,
and the eyes grow dim,
And pain has exhausted
every limb -
The lover of the Lord shall
trust in Him .....

This is yet another specimen of what can happen and be done by a sleeping mind. Yet, can such lines ever mean as much as they seem to? To make dream poems that shift from pole to pole, into a waking substance, the poet may have to take the snatches of vision and make them cohere.

The sleep fantasy has its own form. It is hard to shape it into something saner and more reasoned when one is awake. Let me tell you of a vivid dream I once had. I was with a party of friends, climbing a great hill somewhere and there was a girl among us, dragging her little brother along.

At the top of the hill, she burrowed herself into a nest of thicket, her brother with her, and refused to come down. "You go" she said. "I will stay here and sing to you." We left her there and heard her song as we made our way back.

Sleeping grave

Only a dream.... but what could it mean? It stayed in my mind, and then I made it into a short story, "Birdsong." But it had to be reshaped, dressed up, given a beginning and an end. Somewhere in it, the dream persisted. But the story was so different - like a sleeping grave in which the dream lay wide awake.

Ridgeley Torrence is an American poet who once dreamt that he was composing a poem. He said later that in his dream his lines were the finest he had ever written; words of spectacular beauty, the most profound lines ever to seize his poet's mind.

Every line rang in his head when awoke, but it would seem that the dream landscape had its own startling effect too. Torrence wrote the lines down.... and this is what he got.

It's white to be snow,
It's cold to be ice,
It's windy to blow,
And it's nice to be nice.

Such gnomic lines. But it will take a return of the dream landscape to give them that "spectacular beauty" and profundity. Yet, his are not the only verses I have unearthed. We have the story of how Edmund Wilson, one of America's best known chroniclers of Literature, dreamed that he was cruising the west coast of Italy, stopping at Cologne, Brescia, Rome and Santiago.

He was with poet friends and they played a verse game where every one's verse had to include the words "the mandrake shrieks." In his book, "The Shores of Light" (New York, 1952) Wilson tells how he was very proud to have produced his own verse and, in his dream.

Thought it was brilliant. Still in his dream, he then left the ship. Somewhere he also heard the sound of crows that penetrated his dream. When he awoke, the crows were still making a racket outside his window, and he remembered every line of the verse he had fashioned in his dream:

The human heart is full of leaks;
The human head is full
of vapours;
The crows disband; the
mandrake shrieks;
The scandal was in all the papers

Was he telling us of an encounter with an unburied corpse. Or is he reminding us that all humanity is scandalized and cowers in fear when the mandrake shrieks? Who can really say when the lines are the stuff of dreams?

Waking hours

Another American poet, Mrs. William McFee, wrote many poems in her waking hours, but her dream poems were far superior and very much as in the vein of "Kubla Khan". This is one of her dream poems she faithfully re-rendered on wakening. She declared that not a word was changed, not a line altered.

And you, my love, and you,
my sweet,
The beauty of the morning greet,
For me it's end of day.
Unclosed my eyes, unclosed
the night;
I saw clusters reel and right
And nothing was that was
the same
As it had been ere this
night came;
The moon knelt down to pray.
I went back through the hidden
door
Where no same man had gone
before;
I saw the beauties, touched
the dross;
I drank the wine and kissed
the cross
And gave your love to pay,
That I might touch eternity
A moment's space, now you
are free
Long gone, long lost, away

Modern poetry

It is surprising to find that besides Joyce and the French Mallarme, the bulk of true dream poetry has surfaced in America. But look again and you will find that the main currents of modern poetry, even the harshest, are tending towards something like a dream condition.

There is Poe, of course, but look at our own writers: Jean Arasanayagam, Anne Ranasinghe, Ashley Halpe, Basil Fernando, Eva Ranaweera, the late Alfreda de Silva, and suddenly you find lines and swathes of dreamy wistfulness, phantoms of the dream experience.

No, there is no true dream poetry but poetry that also holds dreams. Today's (Shall we say) dreamy poetry drives the lyric feeling of the old world into the depths of private consciousness, then covers it over with layers of external reality.

Have we stopped depending on our dreams, I wonder, Finally, I give you none other than E.M. Forster. In his essay "An Outsider to Poetry" that appeared in his book "Two Cheers for Democracy" he admits to composing in a dream, but can only give two remembered lines that he labels as "modern poetry" because he says they are quite obscure!

I will put down Hastings, you shall see,
Companion to India as a boat gnawed.

..................................

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