Have you ever had those dreams where all of your teeth fall out? Where you’re flying? Being chased by something? Have you ever had those dreams where you’re pregnant, or as I like to call them, nightmares? Have you ever had dreams where all of the narration and dialogue has to rhyme and comes out in an ABCB pattern with lines of about 5-7 syllables each?
That’s usually where I lose people.
For whatever reason, I have been infected with the rare and pretentious disease of sleep poetry. It’s like watching a movie where a sickening plot unfolds to my sick rhymes but the movie stops and waits if I don’t think of a rhyme fast enough. I don’t know if this is lucid dream-level but I’m pretty sure its something similar. I’m also pretty sure that no one believes me. It’s just about the stupidest thing in the world.
I do not write poetry. I do not read poetry outside of school. There is no reason this should be happening to me.
Despite the fact that I hate everything about this, I still write down the lines I remember from the dream poems upon awaking. I’ve sprinkled in what the dream was about for context. As if it will help this make any sense.
Saturday, 11/12/16
1940’s era. A reasonably good-looking man with those kind of cheeks that are always flushed comes home from the war and starts to seduce an agricultural baron’s daughter, not because he loves her but because he wants that sweet inheritance. The dream ends with them smooching in front of a white picket fence, and the following lines:
It was blush and first blush
And love at first love
And it had a happy ending
The way it never does
Saturday, 8/13/15
Early nineteenth century. Jane Austen kind of feel. Story follows three friends who plan to wait out a hurricane in another friend’s house. Each of them end up going back into the storm to grab something or someone and nearly die coming back. The dream ends with this conversation in the kitchen:
“You witches in the kitchen
I just overheard
What is it about me
That you find so absurd”
“In a storm like this sir
So rough and so wild
The things we go back for
Are like parent to child
She goes back for her research
I go back for my lovely
And the man who has everything
Goes back for his money.”
Saturday, 5/28/16
Present day. Maybe. One scientist steals a second scientist’s research and then gets really nervous and confesses it to a third scientist. I have no idea why I dream about research so much. And why these all seem to happen on Saturdays. The dream ends with the third scientist’s response:
“Although it’s little consolation
You could do it all again
For there are good men as well
And no one remembers them.”
I promise, I want to punch myself in the face too.
The best part is that I have yet to find anyone else who suffers from sleep poetry, probably because I usually try not to bring it up. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said Kubla Khan came to him into a dream. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also did a lot of opium.
If you google “dreams that rhyme” or “dreams where everything rhymes” all you get are words that rhyme with dream. There are no answers. I am trapped in a prison of my own design.
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