Dreams are a central motif in the poetry of Gunnar Ekelöf, and throughout his writing he uses images from them to present insights unattainable through reason or conscious thought.

Ekelöf reflects qualities of both French symbolists and Scandinavian nature-lyricists. Rimbaud's famous declaration that the poet must make himself a voyant, a seer, affected not only the surrealists, but also led poets such as Ekelöf to explore the darkness within themselves. Ekelöf's fascination with Rimbaud was so profound that he translated a large selection of Rimbaud's prose and poetry and wrote a well-researched introduction for his translations. In this introduction Ekelöf suggests that we see Rimbaud as a sacrifice to the primitive dreams which modern man must retain if he is to stay in touch with his emotional life.

The surrealists also explored dreams, and Ekelöf had a clear affinity for those revolutionary writers living in Paris while he himself was there. Although Ekelöf disavowed much direct influence from the surrealists, some of his major themes parallel their obsession with the "unconscious." A major path to this hidden life, as Rimbaud had revealed, was through dreams. As an escape from oppressive reality, or as a return to the innocence and openness of childhood, dreams opened the doors, for all of the poets in this group, into the borders of a life often more confusing, but more meaningful, than daily conscious experience.

In "Solitude, Death and Dreams," a study of a series of themes in Ekelöf's writing, Bengt Landgren identifies a number of qualities attributed to dreams by Ekelöf. For an alternative to reality, the poet says, "Give me poison to die or dreams to live" ("apotheosis"). Dreams also offer a means of reaching some sort of unity with the universe, and they may represent a unique organ of knowledge…. This potential for knowledge moves either outward to the universe or inward to the unconscious self.

Ekelöf uses dreams, then, not as a standard fantasy, a harmless castle-building in the air, but as a tool for cutting away the superficial and everyday restrictive aspects of normal perception. Many of his images derive from this usage. Numerous variations on the contrast between everyday reality and dreams are present in Ekelöf's first volume of poetry [Sent på jorden, Late on Earth]. For example, the positive illumination offered by a dream in "sleep emptiness and even breathing" reverses to a negative fear caused by the loss of dream in the poem "unrhymed sonnet."… While "sleep emptiness and even breathing" moves from dark to light, from the loss of vision to the regaining of it, "unrhymed sonnet" moves from the loss of dream to death. Landgren discusses a longer poem, "cosmic sleepwalker," which further demonstrates Ekelöf's use of images from dreams. In "cosmic sleepwalker," Landgren notes, the dream motif is linked with water and sea imagery. (pp. 531-32)

Reidar Ekner has also noted the significance of dreams to Ekelöf and discusses a passage from Ekelöf's prose where the narrator has a prenatal dream. Both critics relate these connections between dreams, water and mother figures to Ekelöf's personal experience with psychoanalysis. Ultimately, however, for Ekelöf, the emptiness of the world is broken not by psychoanalysis or by mother figures, but by dreams reflecting an identification with the animistic and organic in nature, with birds or stones, at best with children…. Blindness often characterizes Ekelöf's dreamer, whether it is the blindness of stones or the blindness of the Prince in his final trilogy.

In the 1930s, after Ekelöf's first volume, Landgren identifies a period in which Ekelöf, in the tradition of the surrealists, wants to use art as a means of uniting dream and reality…. This dream may relate to Rimbaud's ecstatic vision and his wish to create a universal language, but the wish to use art as a universal synthesizer faded for Ekelöf. (p. 532)

As he matured, Ekelöf continued to use the ability of dreams to offer new poetic images in which the unknown nature of the subconscious could be presented. Preoccupied through the war years with death and blindness, the poet tried to come to terms with man's condition. This effort resulted in a poetry often juxtaposing near and far, life and death, dream and reality. Two major poems written during the forties reflect two different ways of looking beyond the limitations of physical reality, yet both poems are inescapably dark and pessimistic. In "Absentia animi," one of the finest poems in the Swedish language, the poet uses word-music to portray the meaninglessness in external reality. The poem suggests how through antithesis and contradiction one can see beyond the immediately visible…. [The poem delineates] the almost unique sense of "correspondence" between the depth of the self and the depth of the universe which characterizes Ekelöf's major poetry. For him, the cultivation of the emotional and subconscious aspects of the self is one of the prime functions of poetry. In the long poem "Voices under the Ground" the narrator seems to hear a dream dialogue within himself. By listening to the voices, he manages to explore, to experience time and the universe as one great continuous viscous substance.

Ekelöf's unique blend of humility and vision reached its peak in his final three volumes. Nearly every poem could be studied in relation to dream imagery, since the inspiration for the trilogy came from a vision that Ekelöf had during a visit to Istanbul in 1965. Ekelöf had studied Byzantine culture for some time, but his "vision" drew all of his lifelong concerns and energies together. The first volume [Diwan över fursten av Emigón] tells the story of the Prince of Emgion, brutally tortured and blinded, then left to wander during the collapse of Byzantium in the eleventh century. The second volume [Sagan om Fatumeh] concerns a young girl, Fatumeh, who is sister-mother-lover and guide to the mutilated Prince. The third volume [Vägvisare till underjorden] cannot be reduced to a plot, but it appears to be a series of dialogues, primarily between Fatumeh and the Prince.

The poems in all three volumes generally hover on the borders of the unreal, the allegorical and the unconscious. They often refer to dreams, a Shadow or images which suggest things present but invisible, or absent but visible. Occasionally they are quite straightforward…. Yet one senses even in [Ekelöf's simple poems] the imagery typical of dreams, the trivial object containing mysterious and significant connotations. Perhaps it is this quality in Ekelöf's poetry, listening to suggestive voices within himself, that has been most influential on modern Swedish literature. (pp. 532-33)