YOU AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DREAM ONE ANOTHER

WHO AM I?

     Writers are dreamers who gather imaginations and fantasies and bring them down to words. When the reader reads what I have written, you read and imagine or experience my dream – and so you dream along with me. You follow along with my thinking and my path through the fantasies to the imaginations.

So, as a writer, I must be aware that the reader and I share an intimate, sacred space. I must be faithful to the reader because you follow my imagination, my interior becomes your interior, my passions, your passions (even if only for a while.) I must be cautious about what I write because it is not only for my self-expression, but what I write goes into your soul.

It all begins with the writer’s dream and the reader’s willingness to dream along with him.

     When William Shakespeare wrote sonnets to his lover, he was a writer gathering imaginations and fantasies and bringing them down to words on paper. Still, the words expressed an intimacy and knowledge of the lover not known to the ordinary reader. And, when his lover read his writing, she dreamt of his dream more secretly. She followed along with his thinking and his path through his intimate fantasies to the imaginations.

     As a writer, Shakespeare was aware that the reader/lover, and he shared a more intensely intimate, sacred space. He was conscientious about what he wrote because the response was just as highly charged and evocative for his lover as it is for him – and only slightly less for we readers hundreds of years later.

 

WHY AM I HERE?

     The reader or dreamer of the writer's dream has what may be called a Night Man Consciousness versus a Day Man Consciousness. The Day Man Consciousness begins when you wake in the morning and drag your emotions and body out of bed and ends when you go to sleep at night. The Day Man consciousness is sense-bound. When the Day Man lays down to rest, the body and energetic self, your Night Man, arises and unfolds. This is a deeper sleeping than the reader's sleep.

The Day Man believes that all of life is measured by its accomplishments – the stuff of your to-do list, what you post on Facebook and tuck into photo albums - the resumes, degrees, awards, milestones along the concentric circles of your life: business trips, family carpooling, small-town worries, shopping, and Starbucks, culminating in a headstone.

The Day Man in space, the Night Man, exists in time. His/Her existence is measured in cycles of time, rhythmical patterns, seasonal revels, festivals, evolution, joy, warm welcomes, canning, gardens, growth, children, and all expressions of love.  The Night reveals a world qualitatively different from the experience of the day.

     Shakespeare’s Sonnet XLIII is the dream in which the dreamer meets the lover in the night – this is dreamer writing the dream in which he describes the Dream Lover.

 

     “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

     For all the day they view things unrespected;

     But when I sleep in dreams they look on thee,

     And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.

     And thou, whose shadows shadows doth make bright,

     How would thy shadow’s form form happy show

     To the clear day with thy much clearer light,

     When to unseeing eyes they shade shines so!

     How would, I say, my eyes be blessed made

     By looking on thee in the living day,

     When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade

     Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay

          All days are nights till I see thee,

          And nights bright days when dreams

          doth show me thee.”

 

     When you now, hundreds of years after it was first written, re-read Shakespeare’s dream of the Dream Lover, a mood of the night remains. A feeling perhaps. Not the stuff of Day Man Consciousness.

    

WHAT DO I WANT?
     We are all sleepers in the dreams of others. Before you were born, lofty spiritual beings dreamed you into existence. Where are they now? Who is dreaming the dream of you? Who is writing your story? Whose ideals or ideas fill your inner world? Where do you go when you sleep? With whom do you commune? Who is it that dreams that “deep and dreamless sleep” as silent stars go by over the Little Town of Bethlehem? When, where and why will we awaken, lose our illusions or become disenchanted? As D.H. Lawrence writes in “The Song of the Man Who Has Come Through”,

 

     What is the knocking?

     What is the knocking at the door of the night?

     It is somebody wants to do us harm.

     No. No, it is the three strange angels

     Admit them, admit them

 

© Copyright 2014, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved