Leah Larwood is an award-winning poet, a freelance writer and a gestalt psychotherapist. She has an MA in creative writing and her poems have won or been placed in a number of poetry competitions. Oneironaut is Larwood’s debut collection, and a joint winner of the Indigo First Collection competition 2023.

An oneironaut, pronounced Oh-nigh-ronaut, is the name given to an explorer of dream worlds, usually associated with lucid dreaming where a person has the ability to travel within a dream on a conscious basis. A lucid dreamer since adolescence, Larwood tells us that this nocturnal pursuit has been the inspiration behind many of the poems in this collection. The poems follow a certain chronology taking us through the hypnogogic (first stage of sleep) before exploring vivid dreams, nightmares, insomnia and lucid dreams and then taking us through the hypnopompic state (the final phase of sleep) into the ‘fertile void’ of a new day.

In her helpful preface, Larwood tells us that the term ‘lucid dreaming’ was first coined in 1913 by the Dutch writer and psychiatrist, Frederik van Eeden, and that it is a type of dream in which you know that you are dreaming and are able to exert some influence over the dream – sometimes to support psychological or spiritual growth, or other times just for fun.

A subject such as this frees the writer to explore the imagination without any limitations. There is a delicious illogicality to her lines that put me in mind of the work of the Belgian artist René Magritte. Familiar scenes appear in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts which often provoke questions about the nature and boundaries of our perceptions of reality. Already, in the opening stanza of the first poem, ‘Please RSVP by dream,’ we see this approach at work in Larwood’s choice of vocabulary:

 

     Meet me at a safe place

     by the sea, where the lemon sharks

     swim under bougainvillea stars.

     Place your night eyes in and drop

     low. Stay awake as you drift –

     join me when you can.

 

The words ‘lemon’ and ‘bougainvillea’ seem out of context and yet at the same time wholly at home in this surrealistic scenario.

In ‘Hypnogogic Sleep at the Hairdressers,’ Larwood writes that “the buzz of salon white noise / sends me back in utero.” Slipping into this first stage of sleep sounds so easy as she “sail[s] / to an empty place / wide awake, out / at sea.”

Jackdaws appear in several of her poems. These are birds that are often associated with themes of rebirth and renewal, they can also be potential portents of death. If a jackdaw appears to you in a dream then this may indicate a chance to correct your path and avoid making an irreversible mistake. In the first of these poems,’ Jackdaw,’ written after Charles Bukowski’s ‘Bluebird’, Larwood writes:

 

     there’s a jackdaw in my head

     she’s in charge of dark matter

 

     calls the shots from the back room

     light bulb swinging above her desk

 

     I hear her typing late at night

     the quiet genius that stays behind.

 

Trees and plants also figure in several poems. The trees in their ancient wisdom act as a trigger for lucid dreams and the plants as sleep potions for troubled nights. References to Greek mythology mention Hypnos, the god of sleep, and his twin brother, Thanatos, the personification of death, who live in the Underworld where light never reaches them. In other poems we encounter houses without walls, a sleep thief, cures for insomniacs, and an ode to nightmares where Larwood draws out their positive side: “Oh Nightmares, who would have dreamt / that all along you were the teachers / of life’s sleepwalkers, a door to enlightenment, / yet you remain unsung heroes: / tellers of truth, blacksmith’s of dream …Without you, how would we know / which inner conflicts to attend to? We understand, / you roar for the greater good.”

In ‘Oneironaut,’ the title poem of the collection the opening lines recall once again the illogicality of a work by Magritte: ‘she wondered whether this was what it was like / to be dead, to be wide awake when asleep, / yet she felt the most alive she had ever been….Her first time felt like a summer’s day in midwinter…’

The final poem, ‘hypnopompic’ is written in the style of a reverse poem, bringing us back to where we started.

These mysterious poems take us to another realm of the imagination. Prepare to be open to the possibilities they offer.

 

Leah Larwood: Oenironaut, Indigo Dreams Publishing, £9.50