I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.

In this waking life my thoughts

are agate points and deep lagoons

that make ancient cities and heroes

and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.

I remember to swim in air

and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers

to the Moon Cafe, and the light in my head

is the light of the blue-white star.

I went back to sleep in a world

of fewer voices and more noise. Out here

in mossy woods, sleep life is pleasant.

It's good to watch a cedar shake her frills,

good to be surprised by lime on watermelon.

There are days I don't want to wake up.

Then there are days of pain and lost delight,

city days caught in time and trivial stories

when I forget that I am asleep

and can change the game if I awaken.

I cannot say whether the person writing this

is asleep in the world, or awake in the dream


Art: "Autoscopy" by Robert Moss

This poem is published in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press.

On Leaving a Dream

When I leave a dream, I often feel that I step from one room into another. It's a "just so" feeling. I was there, and now I am here. When I exit a dream, I avoid saying "I woke up." That is such a boring way to end a dream narrative. And it's entirely possible that when I open my eyes in one reality, I have fallen asleep in another world that is no less real. When I finish recounting a dream adventure, I may say. "then I left that scene" or, “then I came back to my bedroom”. Sometimes, of course, the exit is less gentle. I return to the dormant body in the bed with a thump, feeling that I just fell to Earth or was dragged out of my dream life in chains. Sometimes the dream stays with me, and I am in both locations - the bedroom and that other room - in a state of dual consciousness after I come back to my body. I am often aware that, when I step out of a dream, the dream and its players may go on without me, leading autonomous life. I have the impression I am not wholly absent from these scenes. A second self has assumed my role - or reclaimed the role I took on for the time of the dream.

Photo: Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy, "Man Passing through Door" in Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

The Art of Memory

Dreaming, waking or in between
in any part of the multiverse
in any body, in any life
you are invited to play
a memory game.

Whatever world you are in
the trick is to remember
the other worlds you inhabit
where you are dead and more alive
and the self that is dreaming you.

- Robert  Moss,  “The Art of Memory”

Photo of trees at the Palais-Royal (c) Robert Moss

Wake up and dream

Did you really say that your dreams have nothing to do with reality? You are in real trouble when your reality has nothing to do with dreams.

Instead of trying to interpret dreams according to everyday assumptions, use dreams to interpret the confused messages of everyday life.

You have a poet hidden inside you. In dreams, your poet makes worlds. He is not hiding from you, you spent years hiding from him. Let him walk with you in your world and your world will change. You will smell colors. You will hear voices in stones. You will find a universe in a flower. You will meet a goddess at a traffic light.

 Everything is waiting for you to wake up. You thought you were dreaming in your sleep, but while your body slept your soul was awake. Right now, as you go about your day, your soul is dozing. Wake up and dream.

- from "Maxims of the Hidden Poet" by Robert Moss

Paintings by Toyen (1) Sleeping (1937) (2) Dream (1937)

I dreamed I woke up

I dreamed I woke up.
In this waking life my thoughts
are agate points and deep lagoons
that make ancient cities and heroes
and bust dakinis out of lunch boxes.

Everything is alive when I am awake.
I remember to swim in air
and fly in water, and ride moon-tigers
to the Moon Cafe, and the light in my head
is the light of the blue-white star.

- from my poem "I Dreamed I Woke Up" in my collection Here, Everything is Dreaming.

Are we asleep in regular life and awake in the dream world? Sometimes it feels like that, and I play with the fluctuations in our sense of reality in “I Dreamed I Woke Up”.
     When I close my eyes, I often have the sense of waking in another landscape, among people who may have been waiting for me. Then there is that phenomenon of “false awakening”. Within a dream, you sleep and wake up, to find later that you were in another level of the dream, not yet back in the body in the bed. Such experiences mark transits from outer to inner courtyards of dreaming, and when we learn to recognize what is going on, this deepens our practice of conscious dreaming.

"Return from Earth Mountain". Oil crayons. (c) Robert Moss