Tag: dreams

Drunk on Possibilities

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of plants surviving the winter and popping up in my garden. I swoon at the possibility of seeds I plant growing up into lush leaves and succulent roots and fruits. I dream of my garden as I nurture it with manure and pull the weeds to prepare for the season.

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of getting my novel published.  I send it to publishers and agents I haven’t sent it to before,  envisioning the book’s acknowledgement page, and hoping beyond my experience of rejections. The thought of being published makes me tipsy.

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of finding my muse again, the inebriation of ludus, the joy of enjoying the energy of growth. My drunkenness makes me giggle, which makes people look at me sometimes.

In the words of Baudelaire, one should always be drunk.

Day 4 Reflection: Dreams

It’s hard to write about dreams these days without sounding trite. Whether dreaming big or following one’s dreams, it’s been said before. 

I want to talk about dreams as the cauldron of our subconscious, where our minds process the bits and pieces of our day into scenarios that twist through our sleep. Luxurious scapes, clandestine relationships, twisted corridors with monsters from our id, these are the denizens of our sleeping hours.

When we dream, sometimes we wake with decadent stretches and a purr, a grin on our face. Other times we sit bolt upright in bed clutching our blankets. Throughout the day, we revisit the dream, mulling it over in our head trying to find meaning in it, to use it to inform our day or to banish the tendrils of nightmare.

Or to harness its power in a story. Many years ago, I suffered through a kidney infection for a few days, spending much of the time asleep. I spent the time in dreams — in one long dream that passed for hours, where I found myself in a desert commune after the experiment called the United States had crumbled into city-states. The contrast between the strife outside and the people who pledged to peace, and the hope that peace lent to those the peaceful folk encountered, stayed with me when I woke, as did the relationship between myself as protagonist and a member of the commune.

I wrote what I could remember, the bare bones of a couple scenes, too long for a short story and too sketchy for a novel. I didn’t write novels back then, feeling overwhelmed by all the words needed.

This spring, after four or five novels under my belt, I revisited that dream with all its dread and promise. I was ready for the dream, for its message, for all its words. 

The book, some seventy-thousand words long, waits for its developmental edit. Sometimes we manifest dreams into reality, one way or another.

Dreaming of a Garden

I dream of violets breaking through the earth,
presenting themselves with shy giggles,
and the ferns unfurling their fronds in stately parade,
Even the scruffy dandelions will come,
elbowing each other for room,
boldly declaring their rights under the sun.

For now, I must be satisfied with dreams
of introducing new lives in the garden —
rhubarb and greens and humble turnips all
slumbering in shells in cool, dry packages.

Naptime

What I could use right now is a good nap.

I think it’s the change in the seasons, even though it’s supposed to get up to 85 degrees today. Or maybe it’s because midterms are coming up, or Missouri Hope is coming up, or …

I am falling asleep at the computer while I type.

I miss my morning naps from kindergarten, when we put rugs on the floor. I didn’t nap back then, instead staring up at the bare bulb in the hallway outside the door, and imagining conversations with it. If I had known that my future would be bereft of morning naps, I would have taken advantage of the time and slept.

Napping, especially in the middle of the day, is oddly satisfying, Thoughts of what needs to be done retreat temporarily and comfort seeps into my bones. My mind wanders into dreams of sorts, and then shuts off. Then I wake up 20 minutes later with my mind less cluttered and my body rested, and it’s time to enter the fray again.

I really need a nap right now.

Dreamblogging

I wish I could blog in my sleep. Right now, I’m sleepy enough that I can’t build up a brilliant topic to write, and I don’t want to leave this space blank. If I could sleep and blog, I could blog my dreams while they were happening, without the internal censor of my waking self trying to make sense of them. I might look something like this:

Richard and I are moving out of an apartment which apparently isn’t ours. We’ve been putting this off because we don’t know whether we’re taking the train or driving home, We are all actually in a house where the family is leaving to go on vacation, leaving it to us (who are leaving) and a half-dozen teens who were hanging at the house without making any attempts of cleaning up after themselves. I am standing in the hallway on the cell phone with a friend (let’s call him Kermit) advising him on how to deal with another friend (let’s call him Arnold), who has a rather unique and quirky personality. I go back in and find Richard’s gone, and I can’t get a hold of him on the phone. I search a nearby college union (University of Illinois Illini Union) to no avail. I’m all weepy all over the place for the next day, stumbling through conferences at the Union because whatever. I finally hear from Richard, who acts like nothing happened. He tells me where he is (notice we are not fully packed for the trip to one of two places, either by train or by car, and all of a sudden I’m on roller skates in an upscale shopping mall, trying to find where Richard is. I discover the only way down to another level in the brick hallway along a mirrored wall is a wide, stalled escalator. I wheel onto the escalator, and instead of skidding down the stairs, I hover down them, all the way down, until I lightly touch the ground.

Think about how I would have written that if I was awake. I would have interpreted it: “The moving out of the apartment mirrors our current situation with evicting renters … ” and I would have tried to make sense of it, smoothing out some of the discontinuities and pointing out that, in real life, I neither skate nor hover.

When I write from a dream, I try to capture that wild discontinuity, the more fanciful elements. But I admit I smooth them out, because it’s only human to either want things to make sense or blame the vivid weirdness of a dream on pizza before bed or a bad acid trip. But think about if the above was a less prosaic dream — and it is rather prosaic in topic. How about a dream about finding a commune in the desert populated by immortals who were trying to hide their identities, and then finding out you were the child of one of those immortals and a human? What kind of identity crisis would she have? And what if she were being pursued for the secret she holds, bringing danger to the commune?

That was a dream I had 30 years ago while sick with a kidney infection, where the dream stretched over two days. I’m writing that book now — it’s called Whose Hearts are Mountains, and I hope to get it done someday.

Keeping the Dream, Fortifying the Dreamer

I am in love with the world “potentiality”. According to Merriam-Webster (2017), the word means “a chance or possibility that something will happen or exist in the future.” When a writer puts something out there, whether it be sending a manuscript to an agent or posting on Wattpad (shameless plug: I have a short story collection developing at https://www.wattpad.com/user/lleachie), they are activating potentiality. The possibilities for getting noticed or getting published in a crowded field of manuscripts are small, but the dream is great. 
And then the agent rejects the piece with the common “It’s not you, it’s me. Keep writing”, or the story moulders on Wattpad …
It’s easy to become dejected, call yourself a failure, believe you’ll never be published, want to give up. But if you’re a writer, you can’t. You just can’t.
Writer, do not give up the dream. Do not buy into the belief that your only hope to be noticed is wishful thinking and a SEO guru. Don’t focus on fame (although wouldn’t that be nice?), but focus on the experience of getting further than you have before and having new experiences and learning. Create your own goals and stretch yourself to make them. Fortify yourself with what your writing means, that it’s important, and that the world doesn’t always honor what’s important, focusing instead on what is loud and flashy.
Maybe the goal in letting your writing out into the world is to release it and see what happens. Does it change a person’s mind? Does it get you on the stage at an open mic? Does it turn you into a blogger? Where does it lead you?