Dream Plagiarism

Lines I dreamt that other poets wrote.

I recently dreamt David Berman was still alive and I’d gone to see a show he was playing in a honky-tonk bar somewhere in the dark, seedy underbelly of Nashville.

He was alone on stage with just a guitar and performed most of his most memorable material, but he closed the show with a new one I had never heard, and when I woke I excitedly wrote down as many lyrics as I could recall:

          🎶 The slow angelicization
          of the American astronaut 🎶

          🎶 A firehouse dalmatian
          exchanges for gold
          another one of its spots 🎶

          🎶 Marooned once again with some beautiful friends
          on an island with no waterfalls on it
          The jester regrets every joke she’s ever told
          She just wants to write a beautiful sonnet 🎶

And the chorus was:

          🎶 Snowfall on chainsaws...
          Rainfall on coleslaw...
          Claw, claw, claw, claw, claw...
          Claw for your windfall... 🎶

That was all I remember.

Still, a pretty epic haul as far as dreamt poetry goes.

For most people, especially for a Berman fan such as myself (easily the finest lyricist of my lifetime), having such a detailed dream should be cause for excitement.

However, because of my peculiar beliefs about the relationship between dreams and copyright, this otherwise remarkable gift of the subconscious was, for some time at least, an ethical spear in my side.

You see, I believe that when you dream lines of poetry that are written by another poet in your dream, those lines actually belong to that poet, not to you, even though technically you dreamt them.

Moreover, I believe dreaming them at all to be an act of plagiarism. You don’t even have to share them upon waking or to become a plagiarist. The dream is theft.

I believe this because I believe poetry is the only substance in the world which can pass through the veil between reality and dream unchanged, and when individual poets are attached to particular lines on either side of that veil, they remain attached on the other side.

One of the few benefits of being the only person who believes this is plagiarism is that I can admit to doing it without too much fear of censure.

And while you might think that this would mean I was dreaming of other poets’ lines all the time, thankfully, it’s only ever happened once before.

It was several years ago and, bizarrely, involved a case of plagiarism in the dream.

In the dream, I had written a poem that contained the lines:

          drill-bit
          of a wish

I published the poem in the dream only to realize when the publication came out that the lines had actually appeared in a book that one of my friends, Zach Savich, had written in the dream.

When the issue of the publication went live, I ended up not sharing the link on Facebook because Zach wasn’t on Facebook, and I didn’t want him to see it. I did, however, share the link on Twitter, which I knew he wasn’t on.

After the issue had been live for a few days, the editor made a post on Facebook calling out writers whose work had been published in the magazine but who hadn’t promoted the issue across all their social media accounts.

I took this as an indirect attack on me and sent the editor a carefully-worded message apologizing for not posting the link to the new issue on Facebook and explaining why. I also submitted two new lines that they could insert in place of drill-bit / of a wish that wouldn’t change the poem terribly much. While the new lines weren’t as good as drill-bit of a wish, I was 100% certain they weren’t anyone else’s.

I woke up before the editor replied.

In real life, I sent Zach a long text message, explaining that I had dreamt the lines drill-bit / of a wish, and that in the dream, they were his. I then digressed into my metaphysical perspective on copyright, strongly implying how conflicted I was about the consequences of my psychic larceny. When I read the message back now, it almost sounds like I was blaming him for writing the line that got me in trouble with myself.

Sensing that absolution rather than chit-chat was my objective in contacting him about the lines, he immediately texted back: “You can have them.”

And a great weight was lifted off my shoulders.