By Ada Limón
United States Poet Laureate
One evening in Lexington, Kentucky, I woke to the sound of a familiar voice ringing out in my bedroom in the middle of the night. The room is cold and dark, only a hazy bar of light coming from under the bedroom door. No shadows. The sound of a clunky fan going round and round. I feel my heart muscles contracting quickly and powerfully, a squeeze and release inside the cage of the body.
Outside it’s not yet morning, no glow on the horizon, just the streetlight doing nothing but lowering its metal head toward the pavement, fixed to its position, reporting for duty. My husband is beside me, his deep, slow breaths rhythmic and hypnotic. Nothing is disturbed. Even the dog is still burrowed in the pillows, only one eye open, watching me stir. The voice I heard in the night, of course, was me, my own raspy yell that broke through the dream world into the waking one as I screamed out, “You cannot take me.”
Once my body calmed down, I was able to get up, pee, pet the cat curled in her bed underneath the nightlight in the bathroom, sip some water, and slide back into bed. My dog continued eyeing my movements, with the hope that the night was still the night and there was still plenty of sleeping to do. As I ease into sleep again, I unravel the dream I just had, pull the thread in a quilt of images, and try to hold on to something taking shape, like a fish slowly coming to the surface of a deep and murky pond. I want to find out its importance, what it was that woke me—what it is the dream is trying to tell me.
In the early 2000s I lived in Brooklyn and for a short time sang in a band named after my first book, Lucky Wreck. We played places like Pete’s Candy Store and Spike Hill with moody southern-inspired singer-songwriter tunes that were all about heartbreak and longing. The guitarist and co-songwriter was from Alabama and had a thick southern drawl and an obsession with Burt Reynolds. He was also a licensed therapist. He once told me that it’s not so much the content of the dream that requires analysis but the feelings of the dream itself—that there’s a connection between the emotion you have in a dream and whatever you’re processing in your waking life. That makes sense to me, but still, I’m interested in the images, too: the elemental factors that inhabit my dream life, the intense colors, the exact pieces of dialogue. For example, if I woke up screaming, I want to know Who was I fighting? I think dreams are more than the leftover emotions of the waking life, an entirely other world opening to us, allowing us to witness another life that requires just as much attention.
I was an active dreamer even at a young age. I could recall my dreams as easily as I could recall a memory from the day before. Most dreams I had as a child, growing up in Northern California in a pale green house off Arnold Drive, were about water. I grew up in Glen Ellen, and across the street from my house was a small creek called the Calabazas Creek that runs from the Mayacamas Mountains down to the Valley of the Moon and all the way to Agua Caliente, where it finally empties out into the Sonoma Creek. The stream is only five and a half miles long, but it runs heavy and long through my dream world. It did as a child, and it does now.
Just last night, the creek appeared as a clear, wide river full of luminous underwater creatures, including two snakes my husband had to fight. Once, the creek held an underwater cave that was full of sacred bones and ancient etchings on the walls. In my waking life as a child, I’d play in that creek for hours. It was where silence happened. At the center of the creek were large rocks I could lie on and watch the oak trees and toyon bristle in the wind. The creek was where I could escape doing and just be. It was a place for solitude. If there is one defining symbol in all of my dreams, it is the Calabazas Creek. Something that helps me remember my dreams now is the mantra Where was the water?
When I was about six years old, my parents got divorced, and I dreamed that the Calabazas Creek was on a fault line—I was on one side of it, and my whole family was on the other. An earthquake shook the clay-colored earth, and the stream widened into a huge chasm that separated us. I was left isolated from them, trying to reach them. Even now, I can still remember the force of that dream: the red clay rising up, the clear, high water, the low oaks breaking from their roots and falling into the creek. My family, disconnected by a giant fracture in the earth between us. As a child, I thought divorce meant being separated from your family forever, and my dreams were clarifying that for me. My own terrified heart made the earth itself crack open in my dream life.
I have always known that my dreams were not just dreams. Some were warnings, some were omens, some were ways of preparing the body and the mind for some unknown future to come, but they weren’t something to be taken lightly. There is very little I can offer by way of explanation about this, but my dreams don’t feel like remnants of the day’s blitzed-out brain emptying its chaotic thoughts into the swirling crystal ball of night. Dreams, to me, feel like something organized, cinematic, epic, and as real as this world.
There are times when I do not know if I have experienced something or dreamed it. After all, isn’t dreaming a way of experiencing? When I wake up in the morning, I write my dreams down, and they help me assess my current human predicament. I see what I’m up against. For example, I know if the water is clear, then I am on the right path. If the water is murky or full of monsters, I am contending with something and should pay attention to what’s coming.
There is a meditation I do that is about trusting your intuition, tuning in to what it is that your whole selfhood is requiring. Each time I close my eyes and do the meditation, the very first thing that arises in my mind are images from my dreams. Dreams are how I figure out what I’m working on in the blood. Dreams are how I know if what I’m doing, the path I’m on, the choices I’m making, are right.
If life is a series of stories we tell ourselves, some more complex than others, and if we honor the fact that stories and storytelling are essential human traits, dreams should be included in our personal narratives. Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and like Didion, I believe a dream is a story we unconsciously tell ourselves in order to confront ourselves. It’s not about making sense of something. It’s about expanding the human possibilities of experience. Perhaps, like the Calabazas Creek, a story trickles from my mind and tells it to my body, then it flows from my body into my future reality. According to the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” We don’t have to necessarily dissect our dreams to learn from them. Each dream is enough on its own.
Dreams are also a way that I connect with the past. Whatever past that is—generational, cellular, archetypal. My dreams don’t always make me sure of a truth or give me all the answers. But they do carry lessons, and it’s my responsibility to pay attention.
As I was getting ready to graduate college, I had a dream that I was part of a tribe that had been slaughtered. In the dream, I came out of my sleeping area that was made of hides and heavy blankets and found most of my family and tribe had been killed. There was snow on the ground, or ash, but either way, I could see the large footprints of a wolf. When I rounded the corner, I came face-to-face with a massive gray wolf, as large as a horse. He had blood dripping from his teeth. It was unclear if he was responsible for the deaths. He seemed neither benevolent nor evil. As I sobbed, he said very slowly, “It’s your job to carry this.” He was not mournful or ashamed, just matter-of-fact.
With his words circling inside me, I awoke, out of breath, my heart pounding. I’ve heard and honor the stories of generational trauma showing up on a cellular level, and though I’m not sure I believe in past lives, I cannot deny some of the vivid details of this dream. My native roots trace back to the Purépecha tribe in a region of Michoacán, Mexico, and though it does not snow there, they do have gray wolves. This was not a memory, and yet, I remember it, to this day, as if it were true.
The dream came at a time in my life when I had to make some big decisions. My path had been like the Calabazas Creek, and now it was bifurcating into two streams, one of which I had to choose: stick with my current passion as a performing artist in theater or become a writer. My undergraduate degree was in drama, and everyone I knew was going on to explore a life on the stage. I was taking an advanced poetry workshop and kept being pulled toward my own fascination of putting words down on the page.
I woke up from that dream, in my small studio apartment in Seattle, and wrote it down. I wrote down what the wolf said. It was my job to carry it. And whether I knew it then or not, I know now that my dream informed my decision to become a writer. And while that sounds absurd and exactly like the kind of thing a writer would say—“I became a writer because a giant wolf visited me in a dream!”—it remains a truth. My truth. The dream intuited who I was going to become before I ever did.
I trust that image of him, the wolf with his bloody fangs, the enormous, furred body. I trust the image of him standing amid the carnage in the snow more than I trust memories of some seminal college experiences. In my dreams, there is often water and sometimes there are wolves, but more frequently there is something to learn from, to turn over in the mind, interrogate, and pay close attention to. Joseph Campbell wrote, “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” The myths that I make nightly in my sleep belong to the essential part of me that is more connected to the universe, the self beyond the self.
Six years ago, my life seemed at a standstill as I faced a strange, undiagnosable health crisis. I was struggling with vestibular neuritis, or vertigo, and while I received MRIs and constant medical advice, no one could figure out what was going on with my body. My blood pressure soared, my sinuses ached, I had constant fatigue, my back pain was unmanageable. Everything was off. But the worst of it was the dizziness. I couldn’t write. Everything made me want to lie down or cry or give up. It was as low as I can remember being because even if I could see my way out mentally, I couldn’t see my way out physically.
During this time, I couldn’t find my way into my poems. I tried to write, but only poems about dizziness or nausea came. It was then I came up with the idea to write about my dreams, to connect my writing life with my dream life. I’d try to write one poem every day, and the job was to record the dreams with complete fidelity to the truth of them, the facts of them, while making the descriptions as poetic as possible. I wrote over forty dream poems, and with each revealing image, I found myself coming back to life.
In one dream, I could see the apocalypse coming, fire and magma ravaging the Mayacamas, and I was on the mountain trying to make my garden. There were flowers everywhere and hummingbirds. I remember the manzanita trees and bay laurel, maroon and red, vibrant on the hillside. I raked and raked in the black soil. I could see the volcano erupting. I knew it was coming, and there I was, insistent on making a garden. I woke up from that dream knowing that I wanted to try to have a child. Even if the world was ending, I wanted to give it a go. The most apocalyptic dreams I had, by far, were when we were trying to conceive.
When I stopped trying to have a child, for the most part the apocalyptic dreams stopped, too. In retrospect, after going through fertility treatments and finally deciding to stop trying, I think the dreams were giving me fertile ground, but they weren’t telling me what I was going to make. Now I think they were also about making art, making a life, making love, survival. I also know that, deep down, part of the decision to stop trying to conceive was linked to the worsening climate crisis. My unconscious wanted me to see the world on fire.
The dream poems were strange, and certainly not all of them were good, but they were a window into me when I needed a way in. In one dream, my now husband wanted to catch a whale shark to prove how much he loved me. A teenager dressed like Holden Caulfield said that there was an inland fishing hole stocked with dragons, and it was easy fishing. I thought my husband should just go catch a dragon. Keep things simple. Instead, he wanted to go out on a big boat and catch a big thing. And right as the boat was hitting open water, an enormous whale broke the surface of the water and stared at us. I still remember the eye, the look. The animal watching us, the great eye of the world.
To me, this was a dream about the passage of time. We were busy proving ourselves, working constantly in our hectic lives, and we were missing out on the simple pleasures of life. The dream was telling me that time itself was passing us. The dream wanted us to slow down, stop trying so hard. The whale wasn’t the wolf, but it was a warning, the idea of what is sacred, what can’t be proven or caught.
In another dream poem, a crocodile caused a flesh wound on my thigh. In another, a single friend in leather pants leaned in and said, “You’re a real person now,” because I was in a relationship and no longer single. Sometimes in my dreams, the animals were ominous, sometimes the men were ominous, sometimes I was invincible, sometimes the whole world was coming to an end. All of these things were in my dreams. I recorded them diligently for forty days. Or rather, forty nights. And at a time when I could barely move my body to walk to the corner deli for toilet paper, I could travel whole worlds in my dreams. Night by night, I was living again.
Some say that you are every character in your own dream. That means I’d be my husband or the whale or the wolf or even the water in my dreams, but I’m not sure if I entirely adhere to that line of thinking. I do believe in archetypes. The elements and how they move through us. Freud famously said that dreams are “concealed realizations of repressed desires,” and I wonder what he’d say about the wolf dream, the great eye of the whale. Those aren’t repressed desires; instead, they feel more like important and intimate images there to teach me something.
A few years ago, I was asked to apply for a prestigious academic job. Up until then, I’d tried my best to live on the edge as an artist. Though I’m on the faculty for a low residency master of fine arts program, I had yet to seek out or commit to a tenured track position. But the job was tempting. I made it to the last round of four finalists. I was honored and excited about the possibility of being chosen, but also I kept having terrible stomach aches and nausea when I thought about the permanence of the position. During this time, I dreamed that I was lying by a huge, beautiful pool surrounded by terra-cotta pillars and sandstone buildings. It was lush and golden, everything the color of sunset. Then, the director of the program suddenly appeared, and I realized that I was only there to clean the pool, not to lounge by it. I was reprimanded. I sat up, apologized profusely, and ashamedly began to clean the pool.
Shortly after this dream, I learned I didn’t get the job. I knew it was for the best—every part of me didn’t want it in the way I should. What might have seemed like freedom was ultimately going to sign me up for a lifetime of hierarchical bureaucracy. I thought the job would’ve been lying in the sun with the whole world glowing in pinks. But my dream—my intuition—knew the truth was I would just be cleaning someone else’s pool.
If Carl Jung describes dreams as “a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul,” then I want very much for that door to be left unlocked. I trust what my dreams tell me, where they are guiding me. I want that hidden door to not be hidden at all. Because behind that door is a whole world of stories worth paying attention to. Sometimes they are the stories of what I’m truly scared of, and sometimes they are stories pointing me toward a future I didn’t know was possible. If I’m paying attention to my dreams, I am paying attention to my whole life—the seen and the unseen.
In the dream where I woke up screaming that night in Lexington, I was telling someone they could not take me. When I stared at the dark circling fan for a while, I let the meaning reveal itself to me. I remembered someone trying to pull me away, to take me into the shadows for good, and I was having none of it. My husband once said, “Dream Ada is a fighter.” And she is. Or I am. Or we are. If my dreams are my personal myths, then the myths, even the frightening ones, are essential to the organization of my inner life.
When I woke myself up, staring at that streetlight hanging its head down low, I remember thinking how strange the waking world was, too. The streetlight, the yellowness of human-made illumination. To me, the waking world and the dream world aren’t so different, aren’t so separate. They are both full of signs, full of stories that help me make sense of who I am and where I belong. They are my intuition.
I would resist anyone pulling me into either of the worlds permanently: I belong to both. Like the fish who rises to the surface, and the fish insistent on going deeper into the dark.