“Sleep & Poetry”

“Dream, Baby Dream”

Part 1: The Restlessness

When the night abruptly happens & I can’t catch up

Suffering might be caused by the insubstantiality of dreams

So at night when you find yourself asleep—sit tight, don’t dream!

 

Part 2: The Second Hour

We lie here haunted & hoping for some kind of digression

To walk down streets & lose ourselves in selfish resurrection—

 

Let’s face it: we just don’t wanna be forgotten

 

Part 3: In the Midst

Now Gatsby talks trash underneath a blanket of scars

I want to cry for Daisy & Gatsby

Why can’t those two crazy kids work it out?

 

Part 4: The Wakeup Call

It’s blinding & brilliant, this glittering & delirious dream

So Dreamers: Beware! All nonsense ends here &

It seems like something to do with me but lately all I can see is that we’re looking for something to lose in our dreams.

Sometimes we lose sleep and sometimes we lose ourselves in our sleep. There’s something about sleep—it rejuvenates us and eludes us as we crave it and perform elaborate rituals around it. When I was a child, I had nightmares that terrorized me and sent me sobbing to my parents’ bedroom. Now I can’t remember those dreams, but I know that they were some all-consuming traps of terrible trials I lived out in my sleep. Now, my nightmares melt into absurdity; dreams are the nonsense that makes sense of us. And by chasing the nonsensical, somehow we seem to form some semblance of what reality isn’t, at least by comparing it to our dreams. Dreams unravel us, confuse us, and keep us talking to anyone and everyone around us about how preternatural they appear.

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true”—Dorothy, “The Wizard of Oz”

But our dreams coming true? That just might be the realest nightmare yet.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol