The Summer Sky
On Dreaming IRL
Welcome to the quarterly newsletter of The Dream Side, a collective of friends, novelists, and teachers: Meng Jin, Rachel Khong, Susanna Kwan, and Shruti Swamy. We’ll send this newsletter at the start of each new season, and share writing prompts in addition to our forthcoming offerings.
Join us for our first-ever retreat, Rewilding Craft—limited spots still available!
Happy solstice, friends. Wow, things are bad right now, aren’t they? I (Shruti) have been waking each morning with an aching jaw and hard shoulders, because I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep (this habit started not coincidentally in 2016). My mind knows more than my body knows what to do with. I’ve been in the long middle of a project that seems to have no end, sitting with my notes on one side and a totemic pile of books on the other, in front of me my novel, which is struggling to understand the moment in which it’s being created. A little stalled, a little stunned—not a little despairing. The word that often comes to my mind these days is senseless.
Then again, dreams get their power from their apparent senselessness. Because they resist linear logic and linear time, because they speak in the potent language of symbols, because they can be wild, funny, mundane, scary, sexy, and devastating sometimes all at once, they are poems our minds make every night as effortlessly as breathing (Kant apparently, according to Meng’s patron saint Anne Carson, refers to dreaming as “involuntary poetry in a healthy state.”) Press on the senselessness of a dream and it can unravel into weird and potent truth—something you didn’t know you knew. What emerges from this dreamspace is the source of most if not all of my writing, and maybe yours too.
The name of our collective, The Dream Side, was inspired by a passage from the essay “Every Exit Is an Entrance” by Anne Carson. In it, she describes her earliest memory, a dream:
That I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.
“I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping,” she writes. “I had entered it from the sleep side. … I found this entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling.” Carson finds this strangeness so consoling because it anticipates the knowledge of her father’s dementia—that is, it tells her something she didn’t know she knew. But she is also enchanted by the self-contained and utterly true image of the dream, uninterpreted: “…it was and remains for me a consolation to think of it lying there, sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order, answerable to no one, apparently penetrable everywhere and yet so perfectly disguised in all the propaganda of its own waking life as to become in a true sense something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house.” The dream’s power—like all good writing—lies both in its legibility and in its profound mystery.
Audre Lorde too writes about the power of dreaming in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”: “…it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.…” We are indeed on the side of those dreams, both the sleep-poems that unspool at night and our most cherished hopes and visions for the future. Our writing can be the bridge between both of those kinds of dreams, and between the realm of our dreaming and our waking world.
Dreaming—writing—these are quite solitary actions. Do they have to be?
Handing out Dream Side flyers a few weeks ago at the Bay Area Book Festival I was feeling unexpectedly thrilled thrusting our flyers at so many bright, interesting looking strangers, remembering how much joy and energy it gives me to be in rooms with people who care about books and writing. How much joy and energy it gives me as a shy extrovert writer to meet people IRL even if the prospect of it in the abstract freaks me out. Some of the most meaningful moments in my adult life have arisen in rooms where people were taking seriously the act of reading and writing books. Some of those rooms have been classrooms at creative writing institutions and some of them have been in community spaces and some of them have been in bookstores or in the living rooms of friends: I have been the teacher sometimes or the student other times but in a lot of these situations those designations didn’t quite make sense, in that it was recognized that we all joined with intention, purpose, and our individual perspectives to create something together.
In hard times, our dreams must get bigger, more vivid, and wilder. In hard times we must dream even when we are awake, and find solace and joy in our dreaming. Our acts of political protest are a kind of communal dreaming, but there are other essential ways for us to dream together. Gathering in rooms to take books seriously. Reading a poem to your friend over the phone. Sitting at your desk and trying to get your story right. Sitting on your back step with a cup of coffee or a small glass of wine and leaning out in your mind to meet the mind of the person whose book you hold in your hands.
Whether or not we are in the same room, will you dream with us?
Writing Prompt: Try Dreaming
Once, in a period of deep depression that coincided (as it almost always does) with an inability to write, I had a series of vivid dreams. In one, I walked barefoot out into a spiral staircase that led to an overgrown backyard. On one step of the staircase was a glass of collected rainwater, which I drank as I descended. In another, I rode in a kayak through a marsh, the guide told me the area was being rewilded. I looked up as birds spread across the sky, returning.
I took these dreams as messages from the creative part of myself, the place from which writing and pleasure and meaning sprung, to the rest of me: I’m still alive, I’m always here. You can find me in your dreams. If you are feeling disconnected from your creative self, why not ask that part of you to help you too? Try dreaming—
Keep a notebook beside your bed. Before you go to sleep, write down a question in this notebook. A question might be: “What happens next in this scene I’m stuck in?” or “What’s wrong not working with my poem?” But it might also be: “What do I need to remember right now?” Try to hold this question in your mind as you fall asleep. In the morning, first thing, scrawl down whatever returns to you of the night’s dreaming. Don’t worry about your handwriting. Sometimes dreams are scary or unpleasant, but those can be answers too. Don’t be afraid of what your subconscious knows. Try this for a week, without looking at what you write. At the end of the week, read these scrawled dreams as though they are a poem, looking for images and feelings that will point you forward.
The Dream Side on Dreaming
Meng: Some months ago I had a dream so vivid and complete the small conscious part of me watching the dream understood I had been gifted a story. Two sentences spoke into the dream—the final two sentences of the story—but I would have to wake to write them. I knew, even as my mind tugged towards waking, remembering the pen I kept at my bedside, that to wake was to lose the dream, its total clarity and mesmerizing logic. Is this what writing is, and why it can feel impossible—the effort to stay inside a dream while also fully awake?
Susanna: I’m looking for the moment when consciousness splinters a dream, when the dream specifics dissolve while the full feeling—of freedom, terror, rage, sweetness, or unfiltered longing—holds steady. I want to be awake in both worlds, held by both logics, unguarded. Writing comes later, in the hours colored by the dregs of sleep, with the day-brain continuing its night work of parsing and remaking the world.
Rachel: I don’t always appear in my own dreams; I don’t know how common or uncommon that is. Recently I dreamed up the beginning of a romantic comedy. It starred Bradley Cooper, and was set on an airplane. The dream even provided me with a title: Wrong Number. All morning, I hummed with possibility — I would write it pseudonymously, it would be so much fun! — before the dream began to fall apart, as dreams do under daylight. The dream itself had given me the illusion of ease; reality would be different, and did I actually want to write a rom-com screenplay starring Bradley Cooper? (I did not.) Even when the content of a dream does not hold up to scrutiny, dreams remind me that anything is possible. They’re borderless and budgetless; there are no constraints. Fiction is unbound in the same manner as dreaming. In fiction, the impossible can happen. Why not let it?
Is there a particularly lyrical/interesting/important/funny dream you have had (recently or in the past)? Has any of your writing started in dreams? Have you ever had a dream come true? What is the relationship to dreaming and writing for you? Please share in the comments!
Upcoming offerings from The Dream Side
We have a few spots left for our inaugural Rewilding Craft Retreat for Bay Area writers. Don’t miss out! If you were thinking about it, now’s the time to reserve yours.
News and Links
Susanna’s beautiful debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, is available now. She will be in conversation with Mia Malhotra and Shanna Farrell at Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco on July 2, and with Michael David Lukas at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley on July 22.
Rachel is teaching a five-week online course called “The Practice of Imagination” (and Shruti is dropping in!). Sign up now for early-bird pricing until July 20.
Shruti’s piece “Heartstopper” about her childhood guru is out from The Believer.
And she’s in conversation with Irene Solà at Green Apple Books on the Park TONIGHT!
Meng is also teaching at Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Workshop in July, on storytelling through the lens of water, waves, and other non-human bodies.
I loved your emphasis on dreams and dreaming. I was a little surprised you did not mention Helene Cixous as in her three sessions lecture "Three steps on the ladder of writing" there are three schools where you have supposed to go : 1)The School of Death 2) For our purpose here The School of Dreams and last 3) the School of Roots. besides this she legged all her dreams -some written on small sheets of paper and many notebooks beside her bed as you recommend to France National Library. Voila. Thank you