A Poetic Turn for Carlos Castaneda’s Lessons in Dreaming

I.

My friend, the poet Thomas Fink, interviewed me for his blog (whimsically titled “Dictung Yammer”). He asked a series of questions about the following prose poem:

At the Funeral Home Bar

This funeral home is impressive, shiny new, vast as a convention hall, coffins and mourners everywhere crowding the horizon. Over there, the dancing Hassidim; yonder, the phlegmatic Peloponnesians. Every religion, every class is accommodated. But I’m here on business. I roll my mother’s wheelchair toward a couple of idle morticians. “Could you watch her for a moment?” I ask. “I’ve got to meet someone at the bar.” “Certainly,” they answer. I can tell they’re about to give me that creepy mortician smile that says: You don’t know what we know about what happens next. However, I don’t have time to humor them. I’ve got business at the funeral home bar—

— which turns out to be a lovely place, warmly lit and crowded with genuine, friendly folk. No rude barroom jocularity here. Indeed, they make quiet, respectful jokes. Occasionally one will place a comforting hand on another’s shoulder.

I’ve come here to meet my friend, but time passes, and she never shows up. “Your friend is late? Get it? She’s your late friend?” says the gentleman next to me. I laugh politely. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Sooner or later, she’ll show up. They always do.”

But she doesn’t, so I decide to head home. Once off the barstool and onto the floor, I realize that everyone here is extremely tall. I even seem to be taller than when I came in. “Mourning will do that to you,” says the gentleman next to me. “Sadness does it. Let me show you,” And he makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. The scene is transformed. We’re no longer affable people at a funeral home bar but tall pine trees in a forest. It is winter. The air is clear and cold. And though we stand together, each of us is somber and alone.

Tom’s first question:

This poem was originally published in your 2005 collection, The After-Death History of My Mother. The fact that the speaker is taking care of his wheel-chair-bound mother and leaves her, alive, with the morticians seems to be laden with significance, especially since he imputes creepiness to their professional affect. The morticians don’t seem trustworthy, but he leaves her with them anyway. A fairly obvious reading would suggest that this is all about the speaker’s acute awareness of his mother’s extreme fragility and closeness to the occasion for a funeral home event. What thoughts do you have about this part of the prose-poem’s first paragraph?

Trying to come up with an answer to his question, I was momentarily stumped. This poem was not something I’d composed in waking life. It was, in fact, a transcription—or the nearest I could get to a transcription—of a dream I’d had while I slept.

II. 

Using my dreams as literal text for poems was a technique I had begun to experiment with early on.

No one should be surprised that dreams are a ripe field for harvesting dream kernels for short poems or epics. There’s a long historical tradition of poets using their dreams going back to a time when waking and dreaming were considered more interconnected than we think of them today. “Oh, that’s only a dream,” people say. But there were times when dreams were taken as portents of future happenings.

When I was a young teacher in the New York State Poets in the School program, I became interested in the use of dreams in teaching kids. By “dreams” I mean the visualizations of thoughts and emotions one has when one is asleep. I wasn’t so much interested in the historical treatment of dreams in poetry, such as Langston Hughes’ “Dreams” which encourages holding fast to one’s aspirations, or “A Dream Within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe, that dramatizes the confusion felt by the narrator as he watches the important things in life slip away. Or even John Berryman, whose Dream Songs speak “as if from a dream world, among uninterpretable, but strangely familiar dream symbols and situations.” Rather, I was fascinated with Kenneth Koch’s use of dreams as a technique to inspire young students to write, that he recorded in his 1970 book, Wishes, Lies and Dreams. Koch was a poet and professor of English at Columbia University, and a summer resident of the Hamptons where I would run into him regularly at the Southampton Diner at three or four o’clock on a weekend morning.

In his book, which relates his own visits to public school classrooms, he presents what I’ve always considered to be a brilliant analysis of the practical mechanisms that can be used to write poems, even by kids who had no previous interest in doing so. The formula of his trilogy—wishes, lies and dreams—is simple: Make a list of the things you wish for and then continue it to perhaps one hundred wishes, each more outlandish than the previous, and see what you get. Or write your autobiography but make it up entirely—one outrageous lie after another. Or recall a dream you’ve had and write it down as if it really happened in waking life. The results of these experiments will certainly verge on the “poetic,” and the marvelous, staggering products these techniques often produce can be labeled confidently as real poetry. The raw material—the wishes, lies, and dreams—are, in the end, the stuff of poetry itself.

I experimented with these writing and teaching techniques, adding my own, such as mistranslation in which I’d give kids a poem in an unfamiliar language and have them translate it. The results were often hilarious and poetic, though some classroom teachers didn’t always agree—those teachers one always ran into who insisted that a poem must rhyme to be poetry.

III.

In the early 1970s I enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia University. My first book had been published two years before, when I was twenty-one, by Long Island University. Naturally, the book and I, as author, were fair game for critics, especially the late poet James Tate who taught my first seminar and who had been my hero poet for several years. His poems were surreal—dreamlike—and I had imitated them, along with the poems of other poets, publishing what my editor thought were the best in the book, which is titled Earth Works. Tate, according to his own lights, took the opportunity to tear my book apart, accusing me of imitating him exclusively. My only defense was that I imitated others, as well, not only his. In any case, the result was that the encounter caused me to temporarily lose confidence in the poetry techniques I had worked for. I was unable to write for the next year, at least.

Sometime later, I began working with a psychologist who was adept at the interpretation of dreams based on the techniques pioneered by the Freudians, and this helped me break through the iceberg in which my writing ability seemed to be frozen.

A good example of Freudian dream interpretation was recently published by Gillian Silverman, the daughter of a psychotherapist. In her early adolescence, her father woke her up for school one morning and she told him a terrifying dream she’d had about a bear. She was overcome by the sensory dimensions of the dream, how the bear had appeared colossal yet lifelike.

“It was really hairy,” I kept repeating, “and it smelled bad.” My father … listened carefully and then gently suggested that the dream might reflect anxiety about my changing pubescent body. “Especially,” he added, “in its bare [B-A-R-E] form.” He lingered on the homonym until I grasped his meaning, my face turning red. “I’m not sure it was actually a bear,” I said quickly. “It was maybe more like a lion.” My father raised his eyebrows and smiled before leaving my room.

I was always fascinated, even thrilled, when my psychologist friend would pluck gems like that from the dreams I’d relate to him. But eventually I wondered if I couldn’t take this sensitivity to dreams to my own writing. That is, in line with Kenneth Koch’s technique, I would write my dreams exactly as I had dreamed them, including all the “gems”—perhaps, as in the bear/bare dream, possible homonyms—that my friend would have focused on, but without stopping to interpret them. My aim would be to relate each dream as if it were a narrative of a waking life. Readers who were interested in interpretation would have plenty of material to chew on, of course, but I, myself, would bypass the interpretation. The benefit of ignoring the Freudian plums along the way would also stop me from self-censorship, should I grasp something that I might not like, on reflection, to share with the public.

In any case, as a prolific dreamer—or, at least, one who remembered his dreams—I began to write them down. Here are two early ones:

Blistered Hands

I’m in a fine restaurant wrestling an old man
for possession of a coffee pot.
“Give it to me now!” the man whimpers,
trying to force my fingers apart.

“It’s bitter,” I shout at him. “Undrinkable!”

The boiling coffee splashes and scalds our clothes.
I could crush you to death this instant,
I’m thinking.

I squeeze the old man’s arms
and feel his bones splinter: desiccated insects.
I step back and look at us both:
Our dress clothes stained; our faces blistered.

What a waste, I think.
To kill this old man
when I myself never drink coffee.

 

The Occasion of Desire

Marilyn Monroe throws herself onto the sand
as we walk along the beach.
“Look,” she teases, “I’ve found the fool-proof way
to drive men wild!”

She begins to strip off her clothes, one layer at a time,
writhing in the sand like an eel.
“Each time I take something off,” she explains,
“I wait a little longer before taking off the next.
By the time I get to the flesh,
every man will be insane with desire.”

She removes piece after piece,
arousing me as never before.

When she reaches the last, she calls:
“Come into my arms, lover.”

I look at my watch: I’m late for work.
“I’m sorry,” I answer. “I have to go to work.”

She looks into my eyes with such silent anguish,
I know she’ll be dead by morning.

All I can do is show her my watch.
“See?” I point out sadly.
“I’m late already.”

 

As I continued to use dreams as my poetic sources, I found I was able to bring to their delivery the techniques that I had been learning the way writers learn: through persistent writing.

For instance, without altering my memory of the dream in any way, I was able to shape, or nudge its elements so that it would reveal the meaning my more mature writing abilities had perceived.

IV. 

While these early dream-inspired poems merely recorded, without analysis, the narrative progress of each dream, I later worked out techniques that have allowed me to collaborate with my dreams. That is, I’ve formed a partnership with whatever deep part of me oversees the dreaming experience and, hand-in-hand, worked together with the dreaming part of me, following and sometimes adjusting the path the dream shadows.

I’ll explain:

Early on, I’d been fascinated by the 1960s pop guru, Carlos Castaneda and his encounter with a putative Yaqui Indian sorcerer, who taught him to dream lucidly. In an early book, Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda quotes the sorcerer, don Juan explaining the concept: “’You must start by doing something very simple,’ he said. ‘Tonight, in your dreams you must look at your hands.”

This challenge seemed straightforward enough, but it took several years’ effort to accomplish it. The result, however, validated for me Castaneda’s prediction.

My ability to attain lucidity in my dreams was enhanced by a short course I took at Stanford University in Lucid Dreaming led by Stephen LaBerge. Aside from the fascination of learning to dream lucidly—that is, to dream and yet be a bystander watching and even participating in a dream. As part of my instruction, I learned to watch myself falling asleep at night, paying attention as I witnessed my thoughts and emotions anthropomorphizing into people, creatures, and things, going about their business as they transitioned from my waking to my dreaming world.

But I have also been able to become a more active partner in the dreams that I mark as having potential for poems. Rather than meddling in the dream by inserting my own ideas, when I see the dream seeming to fixate on something, or lose focus, I gently shepherd it along the logical lines already laid out in the vision.

V. 

Writing—or rather, collaborating—with dreams to make poems is a game like others: fun to play and, at best, yielding surprising, even astonishing, results. It also requires a thoughtfulness that, for one like me who tends to lumber through fine linguistic China shops, had to be learned.

Here’s an example of what I take to be a delicate—that is, delicately abstract—dream poem that demanded I be true to its innate logic:

The “O” Clubs

Two exclusive clubs, one “BIG O,” the other “Little o.” Two sentences without nouns, held together, like all affiliations, by notions of elegance.

BIG O’s members believe they should shout their elegance; Little o’s believe elegance is a delicate thing that needs whispering.

Alas, anything tactile will sink them in some ocean’s grumble or skim them from a flying machine’s stammer. Yet these are daring people, incessant in awareness.

We outsiders don’t care about them, though they mourn us as we reach the end of our sentences, stumbling where the nouns should have been.

 

“Dream signs” can be any occurrence in a dream that tips you off to the fact that you are asleep and dreaming—that is, not awake in daily life, our default assumption when we dream. These signs can be the appearance of relatives and friends who are long dead. Or you might discover that you can fly. The Stanford course taught me many of these signs to watch for. For some people, the vividness of a lucid dream—the world that may seem more real than the world in waking life when you discover you are awake in your dream—is a joyful experience. But after so many years, recognizing a dream sign is my call to get back to work—a wake-up call, so to speak.

One challenge of dream collaboration I’ve experienced is to let a long dream follow its course and not let my attention flag or yield to the temptation of exiting into some other dream possibility tempting me along the way.

In this poem, I found myself in a complex story that could have dissolved into typical dream chaos. At one point I recognized a dramatic situation amidst the absurdity of the story and set myself to coax the dream until it committed itself meaningfully. This took the form of “accompanying” the dream—looking over its shoulder, so to speak—as it reached a crossroads in the action. When I recognized that one of the potential pathways was a more logical or enticing next step than the other, I would coax the dream into that direction.

Korth, or A Problem Resolved

Korth was a student of Professor B who dreamed of an academic career. He was delegated by the professors to be their go-between, carrying folders containing their deliberations back and forth. 

The distance between the two universities required a full day of travel on foot, but Korth was young and fit, with a muscled torso that both professors had noticed early on.  One day, Korth arrived at Professor B’s office to find the professor nervously opening and closing his desk drawers. “I’ve run out of paper on which to write my new equations,” said the professor.  “It is urgent that you get them to Professor A immediately.”

In a professional collaboration, Professor A of the Southern University and Professor B of the Northern University had turned the philosophy of ethics from a speculative discipline to one that could be expressed concisely and absolutely in mathematical formulae. 

Korth was resourceful. He carried no paper, but he did have one writing surface available: his fresh white shirt. “Write your equations on the back of my shirt and I’ll wear them over to Professor A.”

Professor B surmised that this was a good idea. He had Korth turn his back, and, with his felt pen, he wrote out the series of equations in a minute hand.  “You’re all set,” Professor B told Korth. “Run along.”

Korth set out. Several times on the journey he was stopped by students asking about the formulae on the back of his shirt. “What is that for?” one asked.   Korth was proud of his role in advancing Ethics from philosophy to science and thought stupid questions like that deserved evasive or sarcastic responses. “It’s a formula to make beer, a hearty Stout,” Korth answered.

When Korth arrived at Professor A’s office at the Southern University, the professor pronounced Korth’s shirt with all its equations “charming.” He quickly copied them and suggested that Korth take off his shirt and wash it in the sink. “Just for fun,” said the professor, “I’ll write my equations on the back of your shirt, too, and you’ll take them to Professor B.”

Korth was not inclined to remove his shirt. The professor had made a similar request recently when he had offered to give Korth a vigorous backrub, arguing that after his long walk between universities, Korth must be tired and achy.  Korth thanked the professor but declined, suspecting his intentions.

The professor shrugged. “Well,” he said. “There seems to be plenty of room for my equations on the front of your shirt.” So, he took his ball-point pen and, against Korth’s protest, scratched the equations into the front of Korth’s shirt, dotting his “i’s” in an unpleasant and painful way. “Off you go,” he said, pointing Korth toward the office door.

When Korth arrived at the Northern University and found Professor B, the professor chuckled when he saw that Professor A had written his equations on the front of the shirt, making this a game.  “Let’s continue playing, shall we?” said the professor. “Now you just take off that shirt and your pants, while you’re at it, and I’ll have them cleaned. As we wait, how about a vigorous massage?”

Korth had anticipated this. From his backpack he extracted a perfectly clean white shirt. “I’ll just be back,” he said and crossed the hall to the bathroom, wherein he changed into the fresh shirt.

Professor B shrugged. “Let’s fix you up with these new equations I’ve worked out.” He took his quill pen and scratched his mathematical symbols into the back of Korth’s clean shirt leaving some small but painful abrasions in their wake.

This, then, was the way a semester’s tradition continued, with the professors inscribing their equations on Korth’s shirt, and he carrying them back and forth between universities.

Of course, this odd collaboration was not always consummated without some amplified emotions.  When one professor disagreed with the equations of the other, he would answer by painting his equations in dripping red or ghoulish green. And, when one or the other professor was upset that Korth continually refused to take off his shirt, he would inscribe his equations with more painful instruments, such as an engraving pen, a pen knife, or even, on one occasion, a branding iron. (At this, Korth had taken several panicked steps into the hallway.)

Now that the novelty of a shirt covered with equations had worn off, Korth’s journeys between the universities had become less pleasant, with fellow students making rude remarks as Korth passed on the campus walkways. “You’re supposed to get your ink in your arms, not on your clothes!” one shouted.

Annoying as this was, Korth endured it because he recognized the brilliance of the professors’ ethical equations and valued in humbleness the place he occupied in their mathematical evolution. 

For their part, the professors, enamored of Korth’s winsome physique that had grown more muscled and defined because of his long inter-university walks, were frustrated by Korth’s evasions of their attempts to demonstrate what they considered to be their reasonable solution for his aches and pains.

In any case, by the end of that semester, the professors had finished their first round of equations, and a book was published to great faculty acclaim.

“But” both professors declared to Korth, “that was only Volume One. We’ll begin Volume Two with the new semester!”

However, when the new semester began, Korth hadn’t shown up at either of the professor’s offices to receive their new equations. The professors, each on his own campus, began to pine for the absent Korth. Without Korth to carry their equations and brighten their lives with the possibility of a little salacious deviation, the professors soon lost interest in completing Volume Two.

Korth, meanwhile, did miss his weekly treks between the professors, but realized, without the aid of equations, that he had done an honest job for them and for science. As much as he both treasured and winced at the memory of his experience, he realized that his ethical obligation to the professors, to himself, as well as to Ethics itself, only needed to extend to the completion of the one volume. The definitive series of volumes, for all he knew, might continue into eternity, or at least long after he was gone.  Also, at about this time, Korth discovered that, proud as he had been of his semester’s work, he had lost his enthusiasm for academia.

So, one day, wearing a clean white shirt, he picked up his backpack and marched through the massive university gates into an unpredictable world.

Of course, neither professor, when he reflected, could understand why Korth would abandon his dream of tenure for the fearful outside world. However, by the beginning of the new semester, both had begun to inspect the ranks of the entering Freshmen for likely candidates to take on Korth’s job, texting each other to discuss the prospects.

©️ 2024 by Sandy McIntosh, all rights reserved

Sandy McIntosh’s 15 volumes of poetry and prose include, most recently Plan B: A Survivor’s Manual, Lesser Lights: More Tales from a Hamptons’ Apprenticeship, Obsessional, and A Hole in the Ocean: A Hamptons’ Apprenticeship. McIntosh received a BA from Southampton College, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Union Graduate School (UECU). His poetry has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. His journalism and Op-Eds have been published widely in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The New York Daily News, Newsday, and elsewhere. He is a winner of The Best American Poetry and a Silver Medal from the Film Festival of the Americas. For ten years he was the Managing Editor of Confrontation, Long Island University’s national literary journal. He is publisher of Marsh Hawk Press, Inc. This article is from his forthcoming collection, Escape from the Fat Farm, which will be published in fall 2025.

Related Links:

• They Are What We Know
• Sunday Session, May 4, 1997, at Dance Home
• Five Types of Dreaming
• ‘Dreaming’ vs. Dreaming