But dreams can be quite knotty. Sometimes I surprise myself and get scared or wonder why I am dressed like this or that or talking in that way to someone I thought I didn’t know.

Dreams are like running with the wolves, friendly sometimes,  at others watch your back. They can get wild.

Here Carol Ann Duffy plays with the idea of our dreams being a form of creative writing. She suggests through the extended metaphor, that within our heads, within our dreams lie our secret selves, writing themselves out, playing with ‘dragons’ good and bad, until we censor ourselves and wake up, destroying our night excursions.

Carol Ann Duffy writes here for children and for the children who are adults but have enough wonder to return to childhood at night. Her word pools here are marvellous! Makes me think of Hugo?

The images work their hearts out here. I wonder too if poets need to be children again to write ‘wonderfully’?

Answers on a postcard please. Or get your plasticine out and make a shape of your answer? A solid poem…



NIGHT WRITING

Only a neat margin of moonlight

there at the curtain’s edge.

The room like a dark page.

I lie in bed.

Silence is ink.

The sound of my breath dips in

and out. So I begin

night writing. The stars type themselves

far out in space.

Who would guess,

to look at my sleeping face,

the rhymes and tall tales I invent?

Here be dragons; children lost

in the wood; three wishes; the wicked

and the good.

Read my lips.

The small hours are poems.

Dawn is a rubber.