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If you want to investigate dreams there may be no better place to start than poetry. Its syntactical tools echo those of the unconscious: compression, associative and dissociative leaps, metaphors, graphic imagery. Both hold emotion and meaning in taut balance, slightly out of reach of ordinary language. As Sarah Arvio, a widely published, award-winning poet, writes in her unusual new work, Night Thoughts (2013), “many poems behave like dreams, chasing associative patterns through the mind, using riffs and non sequiturs … dancing around an idea and avoiding it” (p. 77).
These two collections of poetry are explicitly dream based, reworking the poet's dreams into crafted lyrics. Dreams in Night Thoughts emerge directly from Arvio's psychoanalysis and trace complex episodes of adolescent trauma. Part poetry, part memoir, and part study of the mind, the book crosses genres but its heart resides in 70 sonnet-like poems that directly relate to dreams from her analysis.
The poems are followed by notes taken in the wake of analytic sessions or dreams. She also adds a 25-page index (when has a poetry book ever had an index?) to facilitate cross-referencing of images, colors, and ideas that travel through both the dreams and the notes. Moving, compelling — and even at times annoyingly self-absorbed — the book conveys an anguished unfolding of the aftermath of trauma. Even though they do not always succeed as stand-alone poems, her verse is so finely attuned to emotional landscapes, worlds of damage, and self-destructiveness that together they create something greater.