Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability, between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge.

Fredric Jameson, Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan

This is the secret of dreams--that we do not dream, but rather we are dreamt. We are the object of the dream, not its maker. The dream is dreamed to us. We are the objects. We simply find ourselves put into a situation.

Carl Jung, Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940

So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I /make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, /we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,/measuring by eye as it falls into alignment/between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky,/she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.
One day we'll lie down and not get up./One day, all we guard will be surrendered.
Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize/what we love, and what it takes/to tend what isn't for our having./So often, fear has led me/to abandon what I know I must relinquish/in time. But for the moment,/I'll listen to her dream,/and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling/more and more detail into the light/of a joint and fragile keeping.

Li-Young Lee, “To Hold”