Awake (reflection)

Awake 

by Jim Morrison

Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.

Choose, they croon, the Ancient Ones. The time has come again.

Choose now, they croon beneath the moon beside an ancient lake.

Enter again the sweet forest.

Enter the hot dream.

Come with us.

Everything is broken up and dances.

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The entire American Prayer spoken-word album by The Doors is a work I hold in great esteem, but I selected this individual poem from the collection for reflection as it seemed the most structured, least lyrical, and most vividly imagined.

Awake, by Jim Morrison, is typical of Morrison’s cryptic, mythical style showcasing the majesty of nature as a sort of ancient, sacred, magic entity with references to astrology and other popular spiritual ideals of the youth of his time.

It took many times of going through this poem before I really started to understand his phrasing and description.  A phrase like “shake dreams from your hair” sounds very abstracted to me, but in the context of the poem it summons imagery of a beautiful girl waking up on a moonlit beach, shaking the sand from her hair against the a backdrop of a starry sky.

He puts himself  provocatively into the poem, a common practice that may have contributed to his status as a sex icon, and talks about racing naked on the beach ; “And we laugh like soft, mad children, Smug in the wooly, cotton brains of infancy.”  A romantic image unromanticized by not describing how it feels, but simply the external image of it, almost distant.  He proceeds to further beckon the audience; “Enter again the sweet forest. Enter the hot dream. Come with us.”  He has captured here the feeling of seduction, not by an individual, but by circumstance, and the audience is left to make a choice.

While I think this poem is beautiful, I’m certain there is more meaning and likely a specific circumstance tied to this poem that I will never know.