#the dream i had last night was even weirder than the ginsberg dream

[rustbeltjessie]

It seems that even my subconscious is gearing up for National Poetry Month, because I've had several poetry-related dreams in the past week. By far the most notable was the one I had three nights ago. In it, I was asked to put together a performance of a famous poem. The poem I was told to use was titled "Spoon River Anthology," like the Edgar Lee Masters book, but it was actually "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, except it wasn't written by Whitman or Masters, it was written by Allen Ginsberg. I was given access to Ginsberg's archives, so I could work from all his versions of the poem rather than just the final/most widely published version, and while looking through the archives I found pages and pages of unpublished/long-lost sections of the poem.

I am one of those rare people who can actually read in my dreams, and I often remember some or all of what I read in them. (Research shows that the people who can read in their dreams overwhelmingly tend to be writers — especially poets.) So immediately upon waking up from the dream, I wrote down the lines I remembered from "Spoon River Song of Myself" by Allen Ginsberg. A few I wrote down include:

Men leer in the riverdark.

Women come into my tent and say 'what you reading?' etc.

I, having known the taste of my own mind, can no longer fart around in America's dusty offices.

There were more, but I'm not going to post them publicly because I may 'plagiarize' them for a project in the future.

Another funny thing about the dream is that Allen Ginsberg was still alive, and he attended the performance, and I got to meet him. But he was relatively young—in his sixties, not nearly 100 like he would be were he actually still alive. Also, he was dressed like a fancy European man from the 18th century (sorta like this Portrait of the Singer Farinelli by Carlo Broschi), which seems wildly uncharacteristic for the real-life Ginsberg.

#rust belt jessie #personal #dreams #poetry #allen ginsberg #my dreams have been reallly intense and/or vivid and/or surreal for the past month+ #it started during pisces season and has carried over into aries season #the dream i had last night was even weirder than the ginsberg dream #but it had nothing to do with poetry and it was sorta traumatic so i'm not going to post about it here