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Per Diem Archive: K. Cliff Sept. 2013, Dream Speak

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.” 

[back]
Author: John Stevenson
in the dream
my dog has a whistle
only I can hear
Author: Garry Gay
In my dream
I am accepted
as a crow
Author: Vanessa Proctor
married now
she thinks of him
only in dreams
Author: Susan Constable
what the wind broke...
catching bits and pieces
of my dream
Author: Paula Kirman
I turned off my phone.
Darkness should equal silence,
except in my dreams.
Author: Melissa Allen
dawn
the snowplow wakes me
from a dream of footprints
Author: Claire Everett
only in dreams...
the music box
without a key
Author: Sandra Simpson
waking from a dream 
of Sweden
the sound of geese
Author: Ted van Zutphen
frangipani – 
even in my dreams,
that scent
Author: Rafał Zabratyński
first snow
the struggle to recall
last night's dream
Author: Mark E. Brager
lulled back into dream cicadas
Author: Dietmar Tauchner
dream over
a crow calls me
into another one
Author: Ray Rasmussen
night dreams...
through a shadowed doorway
a pale moon
Author: Billie Wilson
in my dreams last night
wild Arabian horses –
I butter his toast
Author: 'Haiku Elvis' (Carlos Colón)
dreaming my best haiku
on paper now
how flat it seems
Author: Ann Schwader
hunger moon
even my dreams
empty
Author: Marjorie Buettner
one more dream of you – 
wild roses tangled up
in thorns
Author: Louis Osofsky
another
tangled night, tossing
into dreams
Author: Cara Holman
dreaming in yellow wild buttercups
Author: Svetlana Marisova
autumn mist...
the recurring dream
of self
Author: Kris Kondo
...the short night and yet
I solve all my problems
in my dreams
Author: Daphne Ashling Purpus
dreaming again
a house
I never knew
Author: Christine L. Villa
spring dream...
a fox drenched
in purple rain
Author: Steve Mitchell
moonlight
I've had this conversation
in a dream
Author: Chad Lee Robinson
fireflies …
the dreams I had
as a child
Author: Michele L. Harvey
spindrift...
the way dreams
take shape
Author: Michael Nickels-Wisdom
in my dream,
the father I didn't know
is there and not there
Author: Hamish Ironside
in a dream
I remove my wife's splinter
from my own finger
Author: Joseph Kirschner
to capture the dream
I reach for a tape recorder …
and wake up
Author: Sanjuktaa Asopa
winter night – 
I dream
in monochrome
[back]
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