Dream as a State of Experience

KARAN

Zoë, this series of poems is extraordinary. “The dream says what exists / before you bring the words / is changed by the words when they come.” That might be the central tension in all poetry. The dream here functions as speaker, guide, revealer, seducer. It strips, it hisses, it throws seeds. How did this series come together? What made you want to give the dream a voice?

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ZOË

First, Karan, I want to thank you for these generous and  fascinating questions. It is truly a gift for one’s poems to be read so thoughtfully.

I’ve always loved the actual dream or the invented dream as a state of experience in poems that feels more flexible than regular reality. The dream started talking back/becoming an active participant in conversation in September 2025 when I was in the midst of some health issues. I was living in my body in a different way than I am used to. I wonder if the dream got louder/more vocal because the body was temporarily less mobile; not itself. Some of the earlier poems in the series more overtly reckon with being physically out of sorts. That experience definitely made me turn inward, feel more solitary. Solitude can be hard to come by in my busy house—three kids—but when I find a thread I want to pull, I generally am able to find (or create) discrete chunks of time, very late or very early in the day. I spent a solid month or more writing these dream poems most days, not showing them to anyone. I am a lover of collaboration and writing community, so I often join various community google docs for sharing new poems. But to root into this series, I felt the need to lean into solitude. I started sharing later in the process, when I felt I’d found the poems’ voice. When the dream voice solidified. It seems almost accidental, like I stumbled into the dream voice, and held on.

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KARAN

I’m really taken by the wildflowers threaded throughout. “Jewelweed jack in the pulpit / jacaranda. Knapweed.” Then later, “The dream braids / the horse’s mane and tail with gorse and goldenrod. Heather. / Heliotrope.” These botanical names function like incantations. What draws you to naming plants, or better yet, tell us about your relationship with flowers/plants/trees?

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ZOË

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I try to name a flower for every letter of the alphabet. Or two flowers. (Or the first or last names of poets. Or small towns. Etc.) I thought it might be interesting to have that process—the conscious self trying to soothe itself out of its own way—embedded across the series. I originally thought, actually, that the series might end when I got to the end of the alphabet, but that isn’t what happened. I just started the alphabet over. Alphabet loop. 

I love flower names and the way listing them can sound like ingredients or spells. And I love plants, of course, in my waking life. The way they root and bloom. How unconcerned with human drama they are. I suppose they have their own kinds of dramas, but those dramas don’t trouble me. Or the plants, it seems. They carry on with their cycles.

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KARAN

Let’s talk about eroticism. The dream “steps out of its shorts,” “spills / down its bra,” shows you “coming in a car,” offers “a hand / on a warm waist.” You write, “The dream says there’s no need / to be startled by the revelation / of what you wish.” How do you write about desire without embarrassment? Is the dream permission to say what can’t be said directly?

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ZOË

I think you answered the first question beautifully and accurately with the second. The dream can’t be embarrassed or awkward, or any of those things. That’s the person’s job (both to be embarrassed, I suppose, and to work through it). The dream accepts every desire, or offers up every desire, with such frankness. 

The erotic is an important throughline in waking life, but I don’t generally feel drawn to write about it autobiographically. I feel pretty private about such things. The dream offers an oblique entry point – not to disclose actual things about myself obliquely, but to situate desire itself within the frank and accepting context of the dream. I am fascinated by the fact that the dream is dreamt by a body, but it’s bodyless. It’s an interesting thing, to isolate desire from the desiring body. What might the dream want? Is it lonely, in its bodiless state? There’s something both inherently lonely in the dream, and also the opposite—the collective unconscious could be the least lonely experience of all time—all of us dreaming out of the same primordial soup. In dream life we’re a little more mycelium-like, I think. And did you know that there’s a species of mycelium that has more than 20,000 sexes?! Schizophyllum commune. It’s not an I, it’s a we, meeting up to multiply. Dream erotics feel a little like that.

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KARAN

The Freud/Jung sections are brilliant. “The dream says Freud says / no matter what, it’s all your fault.” Then Jung says “the dream / doesn’t lie.” You’re staging a debate between psychoanalytic approaches while also refusing both. Where do you stand? Can dreams lie?

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ZOË

I think the poems are still trying to figure out what I think about all of that. I’m more team Jung than team Freud, if it’s a pitched battle between those two, I guess. It’s all made up, anyway. Which is not to dismiss any of it—humans trying to understand ourselves as a species and ourselves as part of the greater multiverse is endlessly fascinating, even when I don’t relate to a certain framework. But I do think the dream doesn’t lie. It just is what it is, it offers what it offers, it wants what it wants. That’s not to say that it offers clarity! To obscure, or to represent one thing with another, isn’t the same as lying. Dreams are pretty good at telling it slant.

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KARAN

The wasp sequence moved me. The nest has fallen, the wasps are “revealed in all their fervor,” and you offer one safety on your headboard. “In this way you invite danger.” That line floors me. Throughout the poem, you’re negotiating between tenderness and threat. What does it mean to invite danger as an act of care?

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ZOË

I think there’s a sense of danger in the act of approaching one’s own unconscious. Anything could be in there! And likely is. There can be a sense of dread about contemplating one’s failings, one’s patterns, one’s mistakes and missteps. One’s pride. But of course that’s the way to become more aware and centered, right? To approach one’s flawed and dangerous self with love, to approach the flawed and dangerous humans one loves with this kind of radical acceptance and tenderness. There’s something in the wasps’ striving, too, that moves me. This past summer, there was a section of the wall at the top of the stairs in our old farmhouse that the wasps found their way into. Very suddenly, that whole part of the house hummed. You could feel it when you put your palm against the wall. You could feel them in there trying so hard. Really living.

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KARAN

The horse arrives late but takes over. “This is not your horse it is everyone’s / horse the same horse that has always been / running, the collective horse in everyone’s / amygdala.” You insist it’s yours because you “breathed into its nostrils / thirty years ago.” I wrote something along these lines inspired by Wittgenstein: “The horse in my head / is not the horse in your head.” Are you tussling with Wittgenstein’s ideas here? How do you think about the personal versus the archetypal in your work? 

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ZOË

I didn’t mean to be thinking about Wittgenstein here, and I had to look him up, actually, to remember reading about this a long time ago. I guess this is an instance of the unconscious offering something up from out of the primordial soup! I remember, as a child, wondering if everyone sees the color blue in the same way. And being a little terrified and a little excited by the notion that we could all be agreeing that blue is blue, but that we all have different experiences of it. Do you ever have a dream where what happens is so unfamiliar that you wonder if it might be someone else’s, and you just picked it up accidentally? Like picking up a faraway radio signal because the weather is just right. Or maybe not someone else’s, everyone else’s. I feel like I’m constantly trying to get the self out of the way, I guess, in poems—to be as unselfconscious as possible. “The dream says” poems feel almost like a device I’m using to try to get better at that. 

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KARAN

The poem ends with you protesting, “I am not a horse, / you say. I am not a horse. I am not / a horse.” The dream has transformed you into what you were observing. That refusal feels desperate, funny, true. What happens when the boundary between self and symbol collapses?

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ZOË

One becomes the horse! 
One enters the wormhole. 
Maybe this is part of what happens when one ceases to exist? Or gets out of one’s own way for long enough to embrace being the horse for a little while. 

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KARAN

This poem is long, ambitious, and formally adventurous. It moves through so many registers—botanical, erotic, philosophical, domestic (Walmart, pickles in the fridge). How do you sustain a series like this? What are the pitfalls?

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ZOË

I really hadn’t expected to find such energy for it for such a sustained period of time. I’ve been writing these poems pretty steadily since September, and I don’t feel done. There are plenty of duds and missteps, of course. Times I haven’t gotten out of my own way enough. After a couple clunkers, I think, maybe I should stop. But then I’ll find another thread to pull. I think one of the potential pitfalls is losing track of the archetypes, actually, to get back to that earlier question. When the balance swings back towards the singular self, ie: me, I guess, it misses the point. And becomes, what. Ponderous. I don’t want a book-length poem that is my actual self talking to myself, you know? Sounds insufferable. I don’t know yet what this will turn out to be. Is it a book-length poem? Should I vary the structure, if so? Intersperse different kinds of poems within the “dream says” poems? I’m going to take my time figuring it out. There’s the microcosm of what each poem is trying to get at, and there’s the macrocosm of the collection. I have to move through and into it more, and for longer, to see how the patterns lay out. 

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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ZOË

Ah, can’t we have all of it? I want all of it! If I had to plot myself along axes, though, I’m pretty stuck in the body. Which is maybe funny to say, in a series that’s so disembodied. I have a whole disembodied chapbook, actually, called HYPERSPACE (Factory Hollow Press, 2020), where the self is drifting around the universe talking about its body nonstop. Maybe the disembodied body is my thing. Body/soul.

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell other poets about writing the unconscious, the dream life, the things we can’t quite name?

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ZOË

The first question: To live a full life. To read about and experience as much as possible. That was the late Thomas Lux, who was my advisor in grad school. Read obscure scientific studies, he said. Be curious. Learn about penguins and gasket factories and physics and salt. I loved that. He suggests a kind of openness to the world, an acceptance, a lack of preciousness, that I have held onto as something to strive for. Also, he said, the more you know, the more your unconscious, and your poems, have to work with. 

The second: just go for it. Write the weird thing you’re almost thinking and figure out what you mean later. It can feel almost like a meditative practice, being present to what the dream might offer up. 

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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ZOË

Keep a notebook (or a notes app) by your bed. Write any little scraps of remembered dreams down as soon as you wake up, even if it’s the middle of the night. The more you do this, the more you’ll remember. Decide to do this for whatever length of time you like—a week or two or more. Then take a look at what you’ve written. Are there throughlines? What is the dream saying to you? Write a poem in response—talk back to the dream.

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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ZOË

I love this question. I went to an opening at CPW gallery in Kingston, NY recently where Ocean Vuong was one of four brilliant photographers showing work. His photos are so tender- full of life and emotion. I found them quite moving. When he spoke, he said that the camera “says yes to everything.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that. When you aim a camera, he said, the lens captures both what you want it to capture, and everything else that’s in frame. I’ve been wondering if there is a way to invite the poem to do the same, as much as the form allows. To say yes to more, at least. Which circles back to what Tom Lux said about openness to the world—all of it.

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KARAN

And finally, Zoë, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language? Who taught you that a poem could do this much?

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ZOË

These poets and dozens more, in no particular order (and presented with anxiety about who I may unwittingly be leaving out!):

Jean Valentine, Lucille Clifton, Mary Ruefle, Diane Seuss, Emily Dickinson, Ruth Stone, Jack Gilbert, Octavio Paz, Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, CD Wright, Bianca Stone.

I think the novelists are my poetry teachers, too. In particular, Virginia Woolf, Emily Bronte,

 and Toni Morrison.