Writing Prompt #5: Dream Logic

I'm giving you two writing prompts at once because while you can start on #4 right away, this one is going to take a little time to do properly.  This one's borrowed from Bernadette Mayer's (in)famous "experiments list", from her workshops in the 1970s at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City.  Here's how she explains the writing assignment:

Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.

Mayer proposes keeping a journal of your dreams (one of several journals all going simultaneously) and there are many ways in which you can do that, from keeping a notebook near your bed to using your phone in a variety of ways: leave yourself a voice-mail, use a text-to-speech program to transcribe your dictation, or  (my favorite) send yourself an e-mail (I use a consistent subject, "Line," so that I can easily search for and find all such notes I've sent myself — perhaps you'd want to use "Dreams").

One question to keep in mind, as Mayer notes, is how to represent the odd logic of dreams properly in the poetic setting.  How can something be both realistic and surrealistic at the same time, or how can you render the jumpy narrative, the surprises, the abrupt endings (i.e. waking up) of dreams in your poetry.   Additionally, you might want to consider whether to clearly identify your poem's source in dreams, or present it in a more straightforward manner, letting its oddness, its lack of coherence, present a challenge to your reader.

Because you can't will yourself to dream, I'm putting this prompt up now, but not setting a deadline for completion, however when (and/or if) you write a dream poem (or poems) please post it in the appropriate forum on Blackboard.