A fellow poet on the Eratosphere site has brought up the subject of dreams, and was wondering whether Jung had overestimated their importance. All I can say, from personal experience, is that dreams have played an important role in my own life, especially the recurring dream of trying to "find my way home". Over the past few years the dream has seen me take the following modes of transportation: boat, bus, train, plane, walking, flying, swimming, and even on a motor scooter! Each time, I recognize the landscape, but am unable to reach my final destination, which is Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (although my birthplace is NYC and I've lived in Canada since 1972!). Anyway, as the cliché goes, "Home is where the heart is", and Edna St. Vincent Millay had this to say about it in her sonnet lxiv (see below), which I also take to mean recognizing the source of true poetry:
Grow not too high, grow not too far from home,
Green tree, whose roots are in the granite's face!
Taller than silver spire or golden dome
A tree may grow above its earthy place,
And taller than a cloud, but not so tall
The root may not be mother to the stem,
Lifting rich plenty, though the rivers fall,
To the cold sunny leaves to nourish them.
Have done with blossoms for a time, be bare;
Split rock; plunge downward; take heroic soil, -
Deeper than bones, no pasture for you there;
Deeper than water, deeper than gold and oil:
Earth's firey core alone can feed the bough
That blooms between Orion and the Plough.
Between Orion and the Plough (The Big Dipper) lies Lynx. Lynx resembles a bough, or better still, an albatross, the symbol of the poet!
