Kubla Khan

Dream Fact: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" was written following a dream induced by opium


Read it here. 

Ode

We are the music makers,
And we are the reamers of dreams,
Wandering by long sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful dethless ditties
We build up the wold's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory;
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new son'gs measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying, 
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Ninevah with our singing
And babel itself with our mirth.
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
to the old of the new world's worht;
For each eage is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.



-Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

To Dreamers Everywhere

To Dreamers Everywhere



And if your own and time betray you


If all you hoped and wrought for does


not come,


Why should that dismay you?


Why should creeping doubt benumb


The leaping pulses of your will?


Have patience and be strong.


Seems your waiting long?


One has waited longer, who is waiting


still.


-Amelia Josephine Burr.

You Who Have Dreams, a poem by Mildred Cousens

You Who Have Dreams

The ocean's width is but a wing's bright span,
Islands are stepping stones to continents;
Desert and jungle cannot hinder man,
While mountains hardly constitute a fence.

Only the mind disdains to leave its cell,
To ride the wind, to telescope the miles;
The snail-like soul clings to its narrow shell
And keeps on crawling in familliar aisles.

You who have dreams of human brother-hood,
The time has come for you to teach us how
To have the faith so little understood--
For all the living world is neighbor now.

-Mildred Cousens

It was a strange dream, she said

It was a strange
dream, she said

& I don't
remember a thing
except it kept
my attention the
whole time.

-Brian Andreas, from Strange Dreams: Collected Stories & Drawings

I Dream'd in a Dream by Walt Whitman

I dream'd in a dream
I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there
than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.

-Walt Whitman

dive for dreams

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind) 
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward) 
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at the wedding) 
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for good likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth) 
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds 
-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were. 

-e.e. cummings