What could be a more suitable topic for a poem than a dream? Freud thought dreams represented the stream of our thoughts free of any repression — our raw imagination at play with itself. There’s nothing better than taking a strange dream and transforming it into a surreal sonnet. Some say dreams are simply involuntary reactions, illusions without meaning. However that may be, you are free to change your rapid-eye movements into rhymes, and that’s just what you should do. Breathe meaning into these images and see you if you don’t find something. Even if your poem is only symbolic and metaphoric, does that mean it can’t at least mirror reality in some ways?
Our own dream poems strive to take just a bit of the nebulous quality of dreams and to transform them into words. All poems here are original, and you will only find them at Shadow of Iris.
Radio Dreams, a poem
by Dustin Down
Silken and smooth images
take you back into a dream
of fire ants and yellow jackets
and wars that are never won.
Drop towers in a house of mirrors—
it’s a free fall, a mega drop—
the ground is a motion platform
that swells as it spins out of control.
Snow drips. It’s slush poured
over a scrambled landscape.
It’s a thick milkshake funk,
and you are out in it
thinking of spring—
You put your nose up to a hole
that is in a tree
and you sniff for honey.
It’s the dance of the queen bee
before she dies in the ice and cold
as winter winds ravage her;
and the raven watches, hoping
for a good meal.
Nearby in a small cottage
a tiny ant warms, himself,
on a log, tossed into a fire.
Dream Loss, a poem
by Paul Bearer
You offer me the the entire world.
I say nothing.
You respond to my silence
with a scream
angrily anticipating unsaid scorn.
We argue, and I scream,
I’m sick and tired,
sick and tired of you.
You go to the vanity,
near the window and away from me.
You brush your hair,
pretending not to see me—
then there is an explosion,
a car crash,
an atomic bomb.
With fear I turn away,
and it washes over me—
over my back,
blindness saves me.
It’s over and I look again
and you are gone—
out by the window, a spirit flits by
but returns to pause.
For just an instant
you look directly at me
and my heart stops.
Tears well up in my eyes—
I want to ask
where have you gone?
Cloven Dream, a poem
by Marya Ophir
Horses as ghosts—
manifestations
of the dreaming mind,
a symbol of the animal
component in man.
The devil has a horse’s hoof
or is it a goat’s?
A cloven hoof
that steps on you
just before your
promised abduction.
Look out from behind—
the sleeper gallops
through her nightmare
mixing in
a bit of Persian lore
theriomorphically
now a horse.
Big Dream, a poem
by Tamara Knight
Behemoth beings move
colossal rocks down
elephantine passages
where enormous bats
fly towards gargantuan arches
among giant supports
where gigantic spiders
have built up high webs
of immense proportions
containing jumbo flies
trapped into large sacks
that will be fed to the leviathan
when it emerges from the long tunnel
at the end of the massive door
which only the mighty one can open
with his monstrous arms
and mountainous shoulders
his prodigious strength
stupendous in its vastness;
titanic and mythic.
Dream Iconography, a poem
by the Eclectic Poet
1
Speak in dreams,
where every word becomes a picture—
iconography
, a visual collage
that tells you a secret
you can never quite
hear.
2
Private moments
made public—
your illicit thoughts
become my sins—
it’s a universal slander.
3
Close your eyes
and then
you will see.
4
A boat
somewhere far
sails off a map.
5
Sensory overload
is only possible via
an active imagination.
6
I lie alone
late at night after a dream
with my own thoughts,
they are lonelier than I.
We hope you really enjoyed these flights of fancy. These dreams poems were no mere delusion, but aspirations painted in the language of images. We hope they encourage you to put your own day dreams into words and share them. Now, imagine how sad you’ll be if you miss our next poem, then please go the sidebar and follow Shadow of Iris!