I’ve met some famous people in my time but I won’t tell you who they are. Who cares? In truth it’s the dead people in dreams one should be concerned with.
Admission one: I’ve never had a dream about Sigmund Freud. Nor Carl Jung (who I like better). I did however once have a dream featuring William Butler Yeats. Just for the record, Yeats was sinister.
A few nights ago I had a dream with John Lennon in it. He was chatty and said that The Beatles gave him a kind of moral compass in his adolescence. I told him I never had one when I was young. Poof. Dream over.
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I’ve never liked the poetry of John Berryman but I do like this:
“All souls converge upon a hopeless mote
tonight, as though
the throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise up
to say they cannot care, to say they abide
whatever is to come.
My air is flung with souls which will not stop
and among them hangs a soul that has not died
and refuses to come home.”
― John Berryman, The Dream Songs
I like the conflation of Dante, Whitman, “the great chain of being” with just a dash of Buddha.
Now that’s a dream.
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The best book on Shakespeare and dream is by Marjorie Garber. Shakespeare took the chaos of dreams and made them drastically sensible. Like Mark Twain I think Shakespeare wrote in bed.
Planet of the Blind 