Ten Poems on Sleep and Dreams

Dreams of the unconscious by Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Lucille Clifton, Carl Phillips, and others.

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Every time we read a poem, we dream. We leave the everyday world—our jobs, responsibilities, and friendships—and enter a language spell. "Is all we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?" Poe asked in his poem "A Dream Within a Dream." Countless poets have wrestled with this question, either writing directly about dreams or invoking them through dreamlike manipulation of words and ideas. Here are ten poems to read before bed. As always, all are free to download.

A mother watches her daughter go to sleep. It is a calm and peaceful scene. However, Harwell imbues it with emotional and spiritual complexity as he imagines his daughter as one of the dead, "gone to Hades / With stuffed animals." At the end, we feel the complex weight of a mother's love when she says, "When she goes to go / Where I'm not, my body seizes and yet every night I urge her to go."

China's poem begins with a quiet image of sleeping on a summer day, an image filled with "false emergencies," then moves quickly to a dream in which the speaker sleeps in the coffin of "a girl" and "death coins on the roof." Here, the dream carries real emotional weight and the waking world is what deceives us.

The speaker wakes up after one of "those nights" and is confronted by a mysterious, dreamlike figure. What follows in Gluck's poem is a complex exploration of lust and desire in which "the human body / creates an impasse, an obstacle."

In a meandering, lyrical sentence, Clifton creates a disorienting dream of a house that opens to a world for which "he has no language" and where "all the clocks strike / No." This is a clear example of the way poetry can draw us into the allegorical and strange logic of dreams.

In his poem, Phillips uses the dream to reimagine Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered Christ's crucifixion. The result is a poem of moral reckoning in which "You wonder, could you, / If the driver turned now?"

Every day we wake up with a fresh start. The speaker of Hirschfield's poem awakens twice, inviting us to consider both a physical awakening and a spiritual awakening. But awakening is not simple. In addition to morning coffee, with every awakening, there's "Window / Unbroken, Clear" and "War (My War)" lingering in the distance.

Emily Dickinson: "I felt a funeral in my brain."

Dickinson's famous poem is not about dreams in the conventional sense, but about a mind that "grows numb," falling apart until "a plank in reason broke, / And I fell, and down—" It's a terrifying, hypnotic descent we can't help but follow.

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In just eighteen short lines, Liu creates a complex portrait of two lovers waking up next to each other, a stack of self-help books on the bedside table, one of which "smells of alcohol." "Hold me / Like a dream that's fading / The child you never had," the narrator pleads with his lover. Poetry is the result of both love and separation.

Berryman wrote two volumes of poetry containing his conventional and polyphonic dream songs: 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. The poems follow a character named Henry, who bears a biographical resemblance to the author, although Berryman states that Henry is a fictional character. Here are four from the collection.

With haunting clarity and complex syntax, Cole transports us to the "borderland of an overdose nightmare." It's a confusing, hallucinatory world of "paranoid formation" where "life destroys itself." This final note makes the poem even more amazing.

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Sleep Poems and Poems, Salmagundi Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review

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