Chasing the Dream

New Generation Thinker Dr Hetta Howes investigates why artists from Chaucer to Taylor Swift have found creative inspiration in restless nights and interrupted dreams.

Taylor Swift's latest album Midnights promises 'a journey through terrors and sweet dreams', and she's by no means the first artist to find creative fuel in nocturnal visions. In the Middle Ages, ‘dream poetry’ like Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, became a distinctive, and wildly popular, genre of writing. Dream poems are framed by a restless narrator falling asleep and learning of a story that somehow relates to problems they're trying to process in waking life. On waking the narrator writes down the dream and this becomes the poem.

Using the structure of a Medieval 'dream poem', this programme will take listeners on a journey through the twilight realm between sleeping and waking, exploring the relationship between sleeplessness and creativity. Hetta hears from Dr Lotte Reinbold, an expert on dream poetry at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She also speaks to Professor Mark Blagrove about why restless sleep can prompt us to remember our dreams more vividly, and to the award-winning poet David Harsent who keeps a pad and pen by the bed to record dream fragments on waking.

Producer: Ellie Bury
Reader: Hughie O'Donnell