CIPS NewsBriefs - Summer 2024
Dreaming and Action
Submitted by Christopher Keats, MD
Director of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
Christopher Keats, MD, Director of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, retired from clinical work with patients in March, 2023, and has turned to poetry. His collection of poems, Poems on Sabbatical, is available on Amazon. The poems cover topics including recollections of childhood, the experience of writing poetry, the wonder of the natural world, love, work, retirement, old age and war. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in these things.
Here are three from the book, on the subject of Dreaming, and Dreaming and Action:
Dream Interrupted
I haven’t seen the three-toed sloth,
The aardvark or the kangaroo,
Except in picture books –
Nor have I seen the Matterhorn,
Mt Everest, or the Caspian Sea,
For they are far away –
But I have stood upon the deck
Amidst the wind and waves,
And dreamed of animals and things
Til I am brought back all at once –
Then move to alter course,
Else hit the rocks or worse.
Remembrance
My reminiscence comes, and it’s a dream,
Past thoughts and feelings crowding new aside –
Kaleidoscopic images and scenes
From olden times and people who have died.
They never speak, but live on in my mind,
A resurrection sure which oft arrives
Unbidden, unexpected, and I find
This second coming gives them further lives.
These fleeting creatures quickly disappear,
Though populate the photos of the past –
The soundless scenes now speaking to me here,
But gone again, so quick, dissolving fast.
Now I am old, and soon will leave, and who
Will likewise dream of me when I am gone?
Then will I disappear into the blue,
And no one with my image carry on?
Of what they’ve done, these people of the past,
Of what we’ve done, we creatures of the now:
No edifice remains except the last –
It too will soon be buried by time’s plow.
Of all the evolutionary schemes,
It’s odd that when it comes to making man,
It seems the only certain things are dreams,
Their content not a part of nature’s plan.
But armed with apparatus of the mind,
Capacity to build anew we find.
Dreaming
Last night I dreamed a verse in many lines-
I would have woke and said I understood
How Coleridge did Kubla Kahn design,
But I am left with nothing now instead,
So cannot fill your mind and heart with dreams
That sleeping I had erstwhile thought to do.
Still I am bursting open at the seams
And eagerly I make this poem for you:
If nothing be the source of any verse,
If from thin air a ditty can be caught,
If from oblivion we can coax obverse,
Then can I hope to find what I have sought –
And give the poem I dreamed a second chance
To struggle forth and hitchhike to the dance.
