Ephemerality of Dreams

The memory of a dream
fades like a moonbeam
tip-toeing quietly away,
or an ephemeral flickering
moth in a flame, singed
in the cruel awakening
at break of day.

Kim M. Russell, 6th August 2024

Image by Tim Bernhard on Unsplash

This Tuesday at the dVerse Poets Pub we have a guest host for Poetics, Truedessa, who would like us to take a journey into the world of dream poetry, poems that tell a story based on a dream or a number of dreams intertwined. She says that, ’in the earliest times, shaman were poets of consciousness who understood the power of song and story to teach, heal and open the gateways between the worlds.

Truedessa has given two examples of poems about dreams, one by Langston Hughes and the other by Edgar Allan Poe.

Our challenge is to write poems based on dreams or tidbits of dreams. 

40 thoughts on “Ephemerality of Dreams”

  3. Dreams do feel like they are tip-toeing away, softly in the night before daybreak arrives. You have eloquently expressed the way dreams sometimes wander away from the dreamer.

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  7. Dream matters are indeed fragile in memory, often warped out of shape by human words or totally eclipsed by waking. Respect for the ephermality of dreams may be an essential humility for any true use for them. I’ve found that writing dreams down in a dream journal is my way of telling dreams I’m paying attention — and sometimes this leads to more detailed and memorable dreaming. Sometimes.

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  9. A lovely take on the prompt, Kim, and two great ways of thinking not just about dreams but also our memories of them: they really are fragile, no matter how strong our impressions of them remain as we change.

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