ABSTRACT
Dreams and poetry are the crown jewels of people’s imagination, springing from the creative unconscious and touching their originality, aliveness, and unknowable self. A writer once told the author the dream is the most perfect story because it is all unconscious. Sometimes poets write in a hypnogogic state–between awake and sleep–that dreamy state between people's conscious and unconscious, the land where images, feelings, and reveries glide through, waiting to be caught. A great example of the fleeting power of the dream as poetry can be seen in the work of the nineteenth-century romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge awoke from a dream with a vision of a place like Xanadu, the summer palace of the emperor of China. And when Coleridge returned to his poem an hour later, the remaining 200 to 300 lines had vaporized, and were lost forever. However, what remained has become one of the greatest romantic poems in the English language.
