Craft & Play Vol. 55

Driving in dreams

By Julia McMullen
Jun 19, 2026

Dear friends,

I (Julia) dreamed that my car was careening toward a tree. The brakes wouldn’t work. I could feel my body slipping down from my seat as I attempted with all of my body weight to get them to respond. The car kept going faster and faster, so I opened my door and rolled onto soft grass as I watched my car crash. I woke up shortly. My husband says our dreams can have meanings. That sometimes God can use them to speak to us. I am never sure what He might be saying when I dream of falling from a cliff or crashing my car. But it doesn’t hurt to ask, I suppose.

Today, we are exploring our dreams as we drive through a familiar landscape. Much like a dream, a poem’s imagery can evoke deep emotion: fear, sadness, longing, etc. Driving is much like dreaming, because of the associative leaps that we see out the window when we drive. A field of clovers. Horses. Electrical Pole. Dead skunk. Lake. Intersection. Weeping willow. Because I (Emily) got my license late in life, my husband does the majority of the driving. So I take out a notebook and write what I see. In fact, poets associated with Deep Image have written driving poems. Robert Bly’s Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River and Driving to Town Late Mailing a Letter, and James Wright’s Blessing all involve driving.

Photo by Sebastian Huxley on Unsplash

Instructions:

Choose a familiar route and drive it in real life (as a passenger) or in your mind, writing down the things you usually see along the way. Buildings, plants, potholes, panhandlers. Just write down the images. You can time yourself or write the whole time when you are the passenger.
Then use the images to leap into your subconscious, or your dreams, or your shadow self. Don’t censor. Logic is the enemy of writing in Deep Image mode. You will be surprised what other images a couple of dried up cattails in the ditch can conjure. Robert Bly wrote in his essay, Looking for Dragon Smoke, “In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast.”
Edit the poem and fill in the gaps. Don’t be afraid to sit with your poem longer; recopy it in a different notebook before moving on to the computer.

Here is our poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A Sunday Drive

Sitting in the passenger seat
On a sunny day, I do not want to be touched.
Yet the trees are especially green on the rock
Face hewn out by my groggy stupor.
I am supposed to bleed out in three days, and
My cavernous body is a thicket of burrs
None of which can successfully attach to
The fringe of His garment.
My fingers tap the sticky summer leather
Of my seat. I gaze through a window,
Past bug guts and bird droppings
Splattered there. It is a vision…
What used to be green pastures and
Still waters is now a parkade overflowing
With dandelions turning to seed,
Much like swollen dreams bursting
In the warmth of my mind.
I must have drifted down like one,
From my seat on the church pew,
Dissolved and stolen by the wind
Like so many of my prayers.
In the daydream, I am tossed for a while
On the humid air, so full of hope,
Then I spawn among the toadflax
Plaguing the landscape.

May you all have a blessed weekend!