Poetry and Dreams #261573

My belief that dream and poetry are identical, is more and more confirmed. 2 Lamb, who was in spirit even more than in accomplishment a poet, believed that the degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. 3 Such expressions suggest that dream ing and poetizing, if not identical as Hebbel believed, are more than superficially related. If we wish to understand poetry, a clue like this, given us by the poets themselves, is worth following. Unfortunately, however, dreams are as little known to us in their true nature as poetry itself. Though they are as old as history probably as old as mankind — they are still obscure in their cause and significance and their rela tion to the ordinary mental processes. The people, in all countries and from the earliest times, have clung to the belief that they are significant, particularly as foretelling the future. Their interpretation, however, has always been vague and uncertain. The theories of modern psychologists do not ordinarily go far or deep enough to be convincing or even interesting. Altogether the world of dreams has remained a mystery to us — a world in which we live a fantastic secondary mental life curiously unrelated to that of waking, from which we return puzzled by our fleeting memories.