It’s not often that anyone is encouraged to write bad poetry, but this is one of those occasions. Bad poetry has a knack of making a weird dream symbol declare itself. And it’s fun. So when you want to discover the meaning of a symbol from your dream, try this method. This is what to do.

Take ten uninterrupted minutes to yourself – turn off the phones, lock the doors. Take a pen and a piece of paper, or your laptop, and a timer. Write the name of your weird dream symbol at the top of the page. It is the title of your poem. Set the timer for ten minutes, and write your poem.

You must write your poem fast, letting your fingers do the writing or typing with as little input from your thinking brain as possible. The idea is not to think at all, but just to let your unconscious mind flow its bad (or good) poetry onto the page.

It doesn’t need to rhyme, though speed poems often come out rhyming. It doesn’t even need to make sense. The only thing that makes it a poem is that you mustn’t write in sentences. Let your poem flow as words or phrases in separate lines.

Here’s an example.

Red brooch

A little red brooch
Fell off one day
From a coat
Of a goat
Well a nanny goat really
Nanny’s brooch.

“Let’s broach the subject,”
She said
Of red
Coz it’s said
Or I read
That a shed …  (continued for ten minutes).

When your ten minutes is up, look over your poem. Whether it turned out to be good or bad poetry, the meaning of your dream symbol will probably jump out at you. In this example, the poem reminded the dreamer of secret meetings he held with his friends in the shed at the bottom of his garden when he was a child. They wore red badges under their lapels. He decided the red brooch symbolised ‘secret’.

Your turn!

[Extract from 101 Dream Interpretation Tips, Jane Teresa Anderson, pub 2007]

 

 

 

 

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