The Poetry Game

The Poetry Game

As well as meaningfully connecting the fragments of our own experiences, our dreaming brains connect us back to more ancient experiences of ourselves. Our unconscious awareness invites us back into a mythic realm, a primordial landscape inhabited by the ghosts and gods of our ancestors. These dreams directly connect our own waking reality to dreams of an older and greater reality that has also produced all our art, mythology, religion and psychology.

These are all cultural routes that we use to reflect our selves as we try to find our individual paths to a wider awareness. Our unconscious expresses itself most eloquently in our dreams and myths and in our art and play; our dreams are the great art that we all spontaneously create. We don’t dream to be like each other; we dream to search for our self and know who we are amongst everyone else. We search by creating and we begin our search by copying others as we search for our own dreams.

Our first attempts to copy others often sound like bad poetry, spoken loudly. This is not herd behaviour; we are trying to find our own unspoken dream. First we mimic others and then as we start to hear our own voice emerging, we begin to drift away from others into our own unique poetry. Our poems and dreams both use ambiguity to create webs of associative meaning in the evocation of feeling and atmosphere. And our unconscious works like a poem with its ability to compress and expand memory and meaning, speaking its imagery and feeling its rhythms.

A poem doesn’t describe a space, it creates a space. This is also how play works, creating a space for potential and trying out new strategies and patterns. The ludic state is a serious business in all mammals as we simulate our waking reality and test out our strategies for the future. We play by adopting other identities and needs, beliefs and stories. When we play, we return to a dreaming state where we can develop our fundamental human awareness by stories, songs, chants and poetry. The individuals we value most highly are the performers who play for us and reflect our own deeper truths.

The arts that we profoundly play in and the dreams we autopoetically create are both emotionally loaded forms of communication. Like our collective myths, our works of art are public dreams. And like great art, dreams are not about what they are about; they are about creating our own individuality by stepping into the playground of the unknown and the unfamiliar. In dreams we are all artists, musicians, playwrights and actors.

And the more we play, and the more we create, the more the mundane patterns of everyday life become transfused with the radiant intensity of the incredible. The profound mysteries and secret resources of our ancient selves spring to life in the most unlikely places, a manifestation of our own uniqueness.