From a dream

Yesterday we were on our way back from a weekend out of town, and I got an idea for a short story. This was a six-hour drive, at the end of which there would be no time for writing, not until this afternoon, when my class was over and I'd made it home. I genuinely feared the urge to write would leave me by then--if I'd been alone in the car, I would have pulled over and written for half an hour at a rest stop (probably fueled by one of those Dunkin' Donuts egg sandwiches on a waffle, I'm afraid).

The reason I was so nervous is that the story comes entirely from a dream, or rather a series of dreams, that I've had over the past couple of years. I'd had one the other night. In each, there's an abandoned cottage on a hilltop behind our house. It's the same cottage each time, but it always looks quite different. The story I was working up involved this series of cottages, and the idea that something can be the same and not-the-same at once. As I conceived of it, it wouldn't be a realistic story--or rather, just realistic enough to feel wrong somehow.

The weight of dreams leaves you pretty quickly. I've tried writing from them before, and rarely finish. A few times I've managed to semi-evoke that feeling in fiction, though not usually when I'm employing actual dreams as the material in question. Our dreams, unfortunately, are not inherently interesting to other people. In fiction, they need context, even if that context has to be built into the representation itself. And it's hard to know what specifically they need to carry their own sense with them.

I did manage to hold out until noon today, then write a mess of pages. I don't know if they're any good. Tomorrow I'm going to try a bunch more. Whatever the result, it feels good, a return to the dream state. I suppose it's better to write inspired garbage than nothing.

The Generative Power of Dreams

Rhian had a dream the other night in which some familiar landmarks--our henhouse and chicken run--had been transformed. Instead of the hardware cloth, plywood, and pressure-treated lumber (sorry, water table) the run is really made of, Rhian's brain had reconfigured it with chain-link fencing and a metal-frame door.

This led to a conversation--why on earth would her mind create this fence at all, let alone in the vivid, fully-imagined detail it appeared to her? The chicken run is a very, very familiar thing to her--she sees it many times each day, and could easily describe its every particular from memory. There's no clear reason for the mind to abandon the familiar and replace it with the vivid and new.

I was reminded of a conversation I was having with a student last week, about dialogue in fiction. All of the characters in her story sounded the same--she needed to listen more carefully to the way people really talk. The fact is, I told her, most conversation is designed to impart information, not personality. Any nonstandard filigrees or strange patterns of speech are disadvantageous to the conveyance of content, and our minds tend to ignore them.

But in fiction, all we care about is who people are, and what they like. So the part of the mind that ignores detail must be turned off, and the part of the mind that creates it must be turned on. It's the same part of the mind, I think, that makes completely new things where the familiar should be. The challenge of writing good fiction is to keep this part of the mind switched on even while awake.

I'm teaching a favorite story of mine this week, Kelly Link's "Stone Animals." (This is for a new class--the undergraduate version of my "Weird Stories" course from last year.) This story works with the logic of a dream--Link's mind, when she wrote it, was likely on an associative tear. It's the perfect example of a writer dreaming while awake, packed as it is with creepy nonsequiturs that somehow seem just right. It isn't the strangeness that's so striking--anybody can be selfconsciously weird. It's the just-rightness that's the trick, and it's the kind of thing that most of us have to be in some kind of trance to accomplish, the dream state that creates memorable fiction. Would that I were able to enter into it more often...

Note: this is our 600th post. Yowza. Image above, BTW, is by Gregory Crewdson.

Dreaming About Reading and Writing

One of the most fun, and most rare, dreams I have is that I'm reading a book and it's really really good -- exciting and detailed and moving and lovely. Then when I wake up, I'm thrilled to realize that since I was dreaming the book, I in fact made it up and now I can write it!! Whee!

Then it dawns on me that the book is actually not so great, that the premise is ridiculous or something. Oh, well.

When I took up the piano a few years ago, I started having a new kind of writing-related dream, one that conflates the two kinds of keyboards. In these dreams, I'll be trying to play something I usually know how to play but find it impossible because the keyboard has turned into a computer keyboard (once it was even one of those old Texas Instruments membrane keyboards).

I think the point of these dreams is to contrast the happy ineptitude with which I approach the piano to the agonized ineptitude that characterizes my writing, these days. Anyway, there's something about practice, mastery, skill, performance... I can't figure it all out.

Last night I dreamed I was listening to my old piano teacher play, but when she turned around I saw she was actually my old writing teacher from college. You have to practice a lot! she said. You need to have calluses on your fingers! And you need a teacher!

The human mind is so weird.