On Writing, Memories, and a Bad Night's Sleep

Writing and revising thrusts me deeply into the work under consideration. I lose whole chunks of time, and I find myself living in my head, sounding words, and sifting through image and memory. Does it make for better poems? I hope so. I hope so because the tangled maze of stressful dreams that often happens afterward is difficult to endure. Sometimes this dreamscape gets so frustrating I don't sleep well, waking up anxious or filled with shadows of sadness that are hard to lift. Other times, something productive comes of wandering in the thickets and brambles of my memories. I really wish this were the case all the time, to make it worth the struggle.

For instance, in a dream last night, I was visiting and helping my father in his later stages at his house; there were drifts of flour and sugar, but not salt, all over the floor, and he couldn't or wouldn't tell me what he was trying to do, but there was such a mess to clean up. I was worried he'd put flour in his coffee. Of course, there's more to the dream, but it got really complicated and sad after that. It is not so different from the way things were before he ended up having to go to the nursing home, his hip broken and his mind faltering badly. I wake up from dreams like this not only feeling waves of worry and guilt, but also wondering about the symbols, if there are any, embedded. What is my brain trying to tell me? Is it replaying the same old pain and distress, or is there something about flour and sugar, and why was I worried in the dream about whether salt had spilled as well? 

At any rate, I have a new idea to order my poems that really shakes up what I had been working with, and I have a bad-dream "hangover" that I'm hopeful that daylight and enough coffee will alleviate. Why is the act of creation seemingly relegated by so many people to "oh, she's just playing with words," or it's seen as something to do for fun in one's spare time? I can tell you, it's sometimes a very emotionally draining and fraught experience. I'm not talking about fooling around with goofy rhymes and so on; the act of getting lost in one's memory-forest is both mental and physical. There is no trail of breadcrumbs, either. 

Don't worry, I'm not about to cut off an ear or turn on the gas. But I do feel very unsettled; something wants out of the dark, and I don't know what it is. Yet.

Take good care,

C