I am still working out the relationship for me between the haiku form and my dreams. My tendency still is to favor the dream, so I am aware many of these may give those knowledgeable about haiku heartburn. However, there is something to be said for experimentation, for stretching the limits of a form. And even as I do so, I work very hard to honor the haiku form -- a form I continue to learn about, by the way. Given all this, my dream haiku notebook looks like a much-edited inter-state highway roadmap! (What the dream needs to be saying comes through very readily; it's getting it into "proper" haiku form that can take lots of thought.)

I should mention that these haiku were not necessarily written on the date they were posted, nor were their source dreams dreamt on that date. I choose a dream haiku to post on any given day by looking through my handwritten notebook and picking one that appeals to me for one reason or another. The dream haiku in this little notebook are based on dreams I had from yesterday all the way back to many years ago. I do have the month and year of the dream recorded with the haiku so I could sort all these dream haiku in date order of their source dream should I ever want to.

P.S. of 1/8/07--I just noted there's no daily dream haiku for the 17th of June. I know I posted one, however, I obviously forgot to enter it in my word processing file from which I make the full month's post. There's no way I can figure out which one it was. Sigh.

'til next time, keep dreaming,

Roswila

EDITOR'S NOTES

This is just a sample from Roswila's huge, literate, fascinating blog; it's about my favorite personal dreamsite. She's posted many such collections of a month's dreamku; I chose this one almost at random. But not quite; it's rich in dream animals, nurturance and healing, spirituality and comic touches. When compiling the links to similar dreams (below) I found recurring images: cats, horses, trees, young creatures needing shelter, genderbending, space and other worlds, and visits from the dead.

On Roswila's dreamblog, she posted these haiku in one long column listed in reverse chronological sequence, as befits a blog. Here they're in a grid, making it easier to see echoes between nearby nights; and they're in chronological order, as they were composed. I hope this doesn't generate false patterns--they weren't composed in sets of three!--yet clusters do appear, like "strange things happening to women" on June 4-5-6, and again on June 13-14-15; the public transit poems bracketing the gap on the 17th, or the thieves and hiding places of June 19-24th. It does seem as if dreamku don't stand alone; the poet mulls over issues for a week or more, choosing dreams with similar images... consciously or not.

I bet the most revealing sequence would be neither blog- or composition-, but the sequence of the original dreams. But that info is locked in Roswila's raw notebooks--and she's busy writing this month's dreamku... I hope to persuade her to try putting one month in dream-order so we can see how her dreaming's changed over time!

--Chris Wayan

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