Why Are Our Dreams So Elusive?

Compose imagery and include this in a brief poem about nightmares.  

Ensure students are aware what is meant by the term imageryungroup. Emphasise that imagery is used to create a picture in readers’ minds using words.  

Display the poem on the board, hiding all but the first line. Alternatively, provide students with copies of the magazine and instruct them to leave the first line visible while covering the remainder of the poem with a separate sheet of paper. Read the first line of the first stanza: 

Why are our dreams so elusive? 

Discuss what this makes students think of. List ideas on the board. Sample ideas include:  

• That dreams are easy to forget  
• That it’s difficult to identify the details of a dream 

Read the remainder of the stanza:   

Why do they shimmer —

Now brighter, now dimmer—

Like candlelight shining through lace?  

Emphasise that the first line has been extended through the use of imagery. Discuss what ideas the rest of the stanza makes students think of:  

• That dreams are there one moment and gone the next  
• That just when you feel like you have a solid memory of a dream, it flitters from your memory 

Focus students’ attention on the simile ‘candlelight shining through lace’. View a video of candlelight such as Flickering Candle Flame with Snowy Backgroundungroup, found on YouTube. Discuss how the flame moves and flickers. View images of lace, such as one found on the blog, Light tamer: how to use harsh light to create dramatic photosungroup, from Click. Discuss how candlelight may look through lace, focusing on the pattern of lace and the impact the added layer of lace may make on the strength of the light. A sample response is that the candlelight may cast the pattern of the lace as a flickering shadow on surrounding making clear vision challenging. Model sketching a quick image of how this may appear. 

Emphaise how the imagery adds detail to the idea represented in the first line.  

Place students in pairs and instruct them to repeat this process with the remaining two stanzas. Share responses, directing students towards concluding how the imagery makes the ideas expressed in the first line of each stanza far more vivid and clear.  

Discuss nightmares, collaboratively forming a statement about them. For example:  

‘Nightmares stay with you long after you wake.’  

Discuss how to develop the idea in this statement, using imagery. For example:  

The chill in your spine returns without warning,  

Making you freeze on the spot.  

Just as you begin to relax, the cool clawed hand of dread,  

Pulls you towards memories of creeping monsters and ghouls.  

Analyse the rhyming pattern of the poem, Why Are Our Dreams so Elusive? Ensure students identify that it is an ABCCB rhyme scheme, with lines two and five being a rhyming pair, as are lines three and four.  

Collaboratively edit the imagery composed above, to better match the rhyming pattern from Why Are Our Dreams so Elusive? For example:  

Nightmares stay with you long after you wake 

A chill in your spine without warning,  

You freeze cold as ice on the spot, 

Coolness of dread, you’re no longer hot,  

Suddenly longing for morning.  

Instruct students to work with their partner, composing their own statement about nightmares and adding imagery to compose a stanza.