I agree about the maturity, in the psychology of moving beyond the narcissistic tendencies in order to fully recognize other humans, and how that relates to our society’s challenges with imagining other perspectives without falling prey to self-righteousness.

I like Alice too, though it’s ultimately about mathematics beyond the dream mind. And Surrealism was an exciting revolutionary movement, though it did push into some brutal areas regarding their political stance. When surreal works are created now, I agree, the effect is often very beautiful.

That’s excellent that you get to improv those duets! I agree the moment to moment unexpected manifestations of teamwork is maturity. And the interchange of minds becoming the subject matter in improv music is a lot of its draw for making it, in my life.

I love this sentence: “Improvisation fascinates because it presents an arena where the dreaming mind and the mature waking mind can coexist.”

I did an experiment years ago in Montevallo, Alabama, where a few friends closed ourselves up in my little room for days. We each slept when we wanted to and while doing so, would be surrounded by the other friends projecting images from surreal art books at us to see if that influenced our dreams.

I’d like to share this link as a regular part of a poetry writing course I teach. It would be inserted in a section in which we look at the differences between how Confessionalist poetry is sometimes critiqued as solipsistic and how students can take on other characters as subjects, as well as be aware of themselves as narrators rather than as simply authors (due to such things as the waking consciousness creating a flattering portrait of one’s self.) We also talk about how poetry can access the otherwise inaccessable, the unparaphrasable.