I have been reading Coleridge on dreams

-in an email to the author from Lisa Gorton)                       
                   I dream that the dead are living.

Katharine says soft dreams where the loved dead seem

reciprocal and living are really nightmares to suffer, feel

anguish to awake to the bitter real. If no-theme were dream

I think now I would offer: a Commonplace Book in tatters:

Kurosawa’s fox wedding, Yeats’ quote: in dreams begins

responsibility, or how Confucius laments and exclaims

he has fallen from himself, too long has not seen

in his dreams the Prince of Chang. Not long the foxes sang

for Coleridge on the death-cold Nepean. He explains

in my sleep once more that the dusk reverses the dawn:

that by day the being expresses in words, but unity again

combines that with his night eyes’ yearning vision

fed deep by the body’s random sensations: he would term

‘double-touch’ how the body feels feeling. And a dream

in itself is double-touch, I’m seeing. How tight are the rhymes

in sleep, the subconscious — if you call it that and not a thing

like acetylocholine, when the visual and the emotions

revolve to replace norephinephrine-serotonin neurons:

but the effect as he described it is the same.

                                         Rhymes tighten when

the sleep-brain curls up on itself, as in the womb

or death. I would offer the no-theme stream an explanation

too of Shakespeare’s we are such stuff as dreams

are made of: that it is our function to comprise them,

not their function to be us, and then who does become

the dreamer? Is it as in Bergman’s Shame, when Ullman

alive at the end on the war-exhausted ocean

asks what if the dreamer of all this wakes realising

it was a dream and is ashamed? ‘Living catacombs’

is how Coleridge describes the dream’s comprising.

Lying down, with an opium groan, his fear a leaping

‘great pig’ from sense-data, a frightening woman.

The fox wedding is as formal as the staged imagination,

as if bones are stacked in labels with street signs.

Does this make it sinister, or safer? Sometimes some

unconsciousness overtakes the double-touching,

and despite the nightmare nature of the daring,

the dead can become the living once again.