Artful Dream Writing into the Roots

Abstract

Affective dream writing is form of dream play that invites readers to enter a text’s game of associations without obligation. Both the dreams and dream writing in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) create this disruptive space. Kathy Acker’s poem “Obsession” (1992) and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (1997) accept and extend Brontë’s dream writing with feminist responses that are post-Freudian, yet deeply psychoanalytical, revealing restrictions that disallow animal lives to be fully lived. These poems ripple with idiosyncratic and unsettling hypnogogic affect, inviting readers into a state of crucial hesitation that might open them to transversal cross-species intra-actions.