When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

When life gives you dreams, make poems–then sing them.

Like many other prolific dreamers, I have journals filled with dream snippets, dream fragments, and more rambling epic dreams than I know what to do with.

Here’s one suggestion for working with (or should I say playing with) those dreams that comes from Canadian jazz singer and poet Jeannette Lambert. I took her workshop, “Singing Your Dreams,” during the 33rd annual International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference at Rolduc Conference Centre in Kerkrede,The Netherlands in June.

Lambert suggested we create haiku, or short poems, from our dreams, then set them to music. After just a few minutes a group of about 30 of us were scribbling out our dream poems, and it didn’t take long after that for us to sing them out–and then get up and dance, too. (You just can’t keep a good group of dreamers down!)

Here are a couple of poems that I came up with. (Don’t worry, I won’t sing them.):

*Flying Home*

Village lane, stone church, tall hedge

I fly above laughing, then slip back to bed

where I find you: you are my pillow,

you are my bed.

*Locked up in the Dream*

This is my first floor flat

The prisoner upstairs

tries to kill me, still.

*Snippet*

He wears your death on his chest

like a souvenir T-shirt from his favorite rock band.

Rain mists through the ceiling, as if anyone cares.

Have you written poems from your dreams? Songs? Musical scores? Share them here … or leave a link in the comments section below.