Dream Dreams,
Then Write them, aye—
But Live them first!²
Dreams are naught but flow’rs of air:
Why work so hard at Grasping them?³
Angels must wonder at we who fall so regularly
Out of awareness into a Fantasm-Infected Dark.⁴
Our Dreams, as waves of the deep sea far from any shore,
Come & go, rise & fall, profound & harmless:
Break nowhere, change nothing.⁵
The Dream Grail found as if in dreams is
Not as it had been dreamed when Found—⁶
The rift between Dreams & Reality causes no harm
If only the dreamer Believes seriously in his Dream.⁷
A Dream gives merit to a state of Being,
Rather than the ordering of time—
The dream Corrects time.⁸
They Dream, who shape the Suns
And pillar the blue firmament with Light!⁹
We Gather out of Star-dust, Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust, and splinters of hail, one
Handful of Dream-Dust—not for sale.¹⁰
¹ Laura Hershey, Dream of a Different Woman
² Samuel Eliot Morison, on a monument on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
³ Seng Tsan tr. Rochester Zen Center, Affirming Faith in Mind
⁴ Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
⁵ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
⁶ Alan Dugan, On Finding the Meaning of “Radiance”
⁷ Dmitry Pisarev, Blunders of Immature Thought
⁸ David Ryan, Reliquary
⁹ Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe
¹⁰ Langston Hughes, Comment on Curb