July 3: Nesting Dreams

In order to once more reimpose some discipline on my creative life (which, ironically, seems to make me more productive), I'm going to revive my poetry blog and try to keep it up if not daily than as close to daily as I can make it. The result each day may not be a haiku, but it will be something as close to poetry as I can get it. Feedback of any kind, please, will also help make it feel worthwhile--to know someone other than my mother is reading this. (That doesn't mean you can't provide feedback, Mom!)

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I woke in the dim pre-dawn and couldn't fall back asleep, so I lay still and listened to the ethereal song of a distant robin harmonizing with the river rushing outside the open bedroom window. When I fell back asleep, I had a strange series of dreams, in the first of which I woke up, went out into the kitchen, and noticed all this stuff piled up by the back door--someone was trying to rob us. Before I could get upset, though, I realized that some of the furniture there was not at all familiar so I must be dreaming. Then I fell "back" asleep. Still in the dream, I woke again and told my husband all about this weird dream I'd just had. And fell "back" asleep again. And woke again to another scenario--I don't even recall what--that I realized was too surreal to be true. Finally I woke up for real.

Dreaming within dreams is not an uncommon experience for me. "Do I wake or sleep?" asked Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale. Maybe the robin's song inspired this most recent sequence. I'm reminded of the ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi who famously woke from a dream about being a butterfly questioning whether he was a man who'd dreamt he was a butterfly or was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

Robin's dreamlike song
lulls me to sleep. Or was I
already dreaming?