Dream, That’s The Thing To Do…
Could we draw creative inspiration from our dreams?
Dream, When You’re Feeling Blue
Dream, That’s the Thing to Do…
- Robert Creely (Introduction to Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams)
The subconscious mind is immensely creative when we dream. You would never hear about a boring dream. They are all eventful, and full of color.
I believe that recording dreams with their incongruity intact leads to creative possibilities. I was pleasantly surprised to find out recently, that poet Elizabeth Bishop thought so too! In an interview that she gave to Paris Review, she mentions that she thought this (recording dreams) was the way to write poetry. She believed that eating cheese before bedtime would make her dream ‘interesting’ dreams!
Jack Kerouac famously recorded his dreams and even published a collection. “Other dream-record keepers include all the poets I know”, he wrote, adding that “Dreams must be recorded as they come, spontaneously”.
When you dream the mind wanders, imagining, with wild abandon and without the guardrails of logic and reasoning — an act that you cannot bring your conscious self to attempt. Such unbridled freedom fosters creativity and produces something novel. The raw, unpredictable collection of thoughts is fascinating and haunting and even makes deep philosophical sense. I don't mean to interpret dreams in any way — there are volumes published on the subject, but my interest in dreams is just the same as Kerouac’s — that they are “…fantastically real movies of what’s really going on…”.
Awake, we are unable to accept or process anything that is not orderly. Our obsession with the need for congruity in our utterances and thoughts hampers creativity. When you write, the editorial brain gets in the way of scribing thoughts as they occur.
So, attempting to record a dream results in an interesting mix: Of disparate, incongruous thoughts and orderly consciousness working together. While narrating a dream, the incidents and the general storyline are very coherent, leading to logical endings. The conscious mind fills with logical connectors, the blanks between the discontinuous montage of thoughts that constituted the dream. Perhaps it is to avoid the intervention of this editorial brain, that Kerouac woke up in the middle of the night to scribble his dreams in a semi-sleepy state.
I don’t record all my dreams, for I barely recall them in their entirety in the morning. But some of them affect me a lot and stay back in my memory, and in a lot of detail too. When I try to record it, I am sure that I add some spice to it — contamination caused by my consciousness.
But then, they sound much more fantastic, original, and creative than anything I can produce with my woken senses.
