Dream Speak -- edited by Kirsten Cliff

“Suppose someone told you
that there was something that spoke to you every night,
that always presented you with a truth about your own life and soul,
that was tailor-made to your individual needs and particular life-story,
and that offered to guide you throughout your lifetime,
and connect you with a source of wisdom far beyond yourself.
And, furthermore, suppose that all of this was absolutely free.
Naturally you would be astonished that something like this existed.
Yet this is exactly the way it is with our dreams.”
John A. Sanford, Dreams and Healing (Paulist Press, 1975)

The view I subscribe to in doing my own dream-work is that of Carl Gustav Jung, the twentieth-century Swiss psychiatrist. Paying attention to and interpreting my dreams is part of a spiritual path that I've chosen to take, and one I'm grateful to have found.

dream speak . . .
sunlight on the opening
tulip's tips

“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.”
From The Art of Dreaming by Jill Mellick (Conari Press, 1996)

But it doesn't matter what beliefs one holds. We are fascinated by our dreams, and haiku is just one way of expressing the images and feelings we have gained from a night of dreaming. Our Japanese counterparts have been working with the stuff of dreams in their poetry for hundreds of years. Here I've collected a month of haiku that joins that tradition in celebrating dreams: our experiences of being in them, waking from them, and falling back into them.

As Joseph Kirschner wrote in Inside Out: Haiku and Dreams (Deep North Press, 2003), “One may consider each contributed dream haiku as a snapshot of an individual somewhere on his or her journey into heightened awareness – a spiritual awareness.”