Ten Poems about Sleep and Dreaming

Each time we read a poem, we dream. We leave the everyday world—our jobs, responsibilities, and friendships—and enter into a spell cast by language. “Is all that we see or seem / but a dream within a dream?” Poe famously asked in his poem “A Dream Within a Dream.” Countless poets have wrestled with this question, either writing about dreams directly or invoking them through the dreamlike manipulation of words and ideas. Here are ten poems to read before you fall asleep. As always, all are free to download.

“Dead,” Sarah Harwell
A mother watches her daughter fall asleep. It’s a calm, peaceful scene. Yet Harwell infuses it with emotional and spiritual complexity as she imagines her daughter as one of the dead, “gone to Hades / with her stuffed animals.” By the end, we feel the complicated weight of a mother’s love when she states, “my body seizes when she leaves to go / where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.”

“Summer Sleep,” Marilyn Chin
Chin’s poem begins with a placid image of sleeping in on a summer’s day, one filled with “false emergencies,” then quickly pivots to a dream in which the speaker sleeps in a claustrophobic “one-girl” coffin, and “death coins on the roof.” Here, the dream carries the true emotional weight, and the waking world is what deceives us.

“Dream of Lust,” Louise Glück
A speaker wakes after one of “those nights” and confronts a mysterious, dreamlike figure. What follows in Glück’s poem is a complicated exploration of lust and desire in which “the human body / makes an impasse, an obstacle.”

“My Dream About Time,” Lucille Clifton
In a single lyrical, winding sentence, Clifton creates a disorienting dream of a house that opens to a world that “she has no language for” and where “all of the clocks strike / no.” It’s a prime example of the way poetry can viscerally draw us into the allegorical and strange logic of dreams.

“Dream for Pilate,” Carl Phillips
In his poem, Phillips uses a dream to reimagine Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered the crucifixion of Christ. The result is a poem of moral reckoning in which “you wonder, would you make it, / if you had the driver turn around now.”

“I Wake Early,” Jane Hirshfield
Every day, we wake to a fresh start. The speaker in Hirshfield’s poem wakes twice, inviting us to consider both a physical awakening and a spiritual one. But the waking is not simple. In addition to the morning coffee, with each waking there is “the window / unbroken, transparent” and “the war (my war)” that lingers in the distance.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson
Dickinson’s famous poem is not about dreams in the conventional sense, but about a mind “going numb,” fraying until “a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down—” It’s a terrifying and hypnotic descent that we can’t help but follow.

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“Survivors,” Timothy Liu
In just eighteen short lines, Liu creates a complicated portrait of two lovers waking beside each other, a stack of self-help books on the nightstand, one of them “reeking of alcohol.” The narrator implores his lover: “Hold me / like a dream that will dissolve / a childhood you never had.” The resulting poem is one of both love and disintegration.

Four Dream Songs,” John Berryman
Berryman wrote two volumes of poetry that comprise his canonical, polyphonic Dream Songs: 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. The poems follow a character named Henry who shares a biographical likeness to the author, though Berryman states Henry is an imaginary character. Here are four in the series.

“Toxicology,” Henri Cole
With disturbing clarity and labyrinthine syntax, Cole lures us into the “nightmare border country of overdoses.” It’s a dizzying, hallucinogenic world of “paranoid dissembling” in which “life undeaths itself.” This makes the poem’s final note all the more surprising.

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