The unconscious, the blue, is the space of creativity and imaginative power for McGuckian. As Catherine Byron says, "Painting is a dream activity," for McGuckian, "like writing, like love" (Byron, 17). All these activities try to access the unconscious in order to render the unspeakable emotions of the heart.

Through her own experiences and emotions, and her attempts to break through to the unconscious, McGuckian draws us towards her "secret place." She offers us "these periodic notebooks from her dreamtime. . .to give us access to the realities that the material world is commonly taken to conceal" (Byron, 17). Entangling us within her poems--as we try to unravel her thoughts and images--McGuckian encourages us to access our own mysterious blue spaces. Within these spaces exists truth ("the realities") that the material world (i.e. the conscious realm or the Vermeer paintings) covers up.

McGuckian believes that we can discover truth in the dream world "if we will but look with a poet's, a painter's, a dreamer's eye. . .if we will but use our bodies and ourselves as the supreme material on which to focus" (Byron, 17). To gain understanding of the world we must de-layer ourselves and attempt to understand even our unconscious processes. A new understanding of the self will give us new eyes with which to view the world around us. Like many poets and philosophers before her, what McGuckian searches for and tries to present is "a universal understanding of the human condition" (Shailer, 118).