Freud was some wrong about dreams
Poem ca. 1967 by John Berryman
Freud was some wrong about dreams, or almost all;
Grand Jewish ruler, custodian of the past,
I tell you, Sir, you have enlightened but
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This is #327 of Berryman's Dream Songs--a series (or one loose epic poem) published in two parts. Part 1, titled simply 77 Dream Songs, won him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1964; this piece is from part 2, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs (New York, 1968).
Though fascinating, they're not dream songs. Not songs, not telling dreams, not poems appearing in dreams. They seem to contain very little dream material at all. Feverish, playful and wild, they're more like acid than dreaming.
However, Berryman spent the whole year before he began his epic series doing exactly what he claims here: fiercely scrutinizing every dream he had, coming up with many interpretations for the same facts. He concluded--as have most serious dreamworkers since Berryman's time--that Freud's rigid system was simply wrong.
As I see it, Berryman tried in Dream Songs to write poems catching the vivid shifty many-meaninged roller-coaster feel that he'd learned from his dreamwork. In this sense, as a series, or, better, as a style, I think Dream Songs really were dream-inspired.
I chose the poem above for its subject, of course; but it's atypical. Here's a fairer sample of the series--I'll open the book at random. Ah. Dream Song #191.
The autumn breeze was light & bright. A small bird
flew in the back door and the beagle got it (half-beagle) on the second try. My wife kills flies & feeds them to the dog, five last night, plus one Rufus snapped herself. This is a house of death and one of Henry's oldest friends was killed,
The leaves fall, lives fall, every little while
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