Writers Dreaming

On Bad Dreams:

Some people don’t like to talk about bad dreams, feeling that talking about it gives power to the scary stuff. Well o.k. Here’s the deal. Sometimes words make things bigger than they are. But sometimes, they make something smaller, too.

Think to a time when you told a joke, and somebody understood it. Well, explaining it didn’t make it funny. In fact, it took the humor away. When you put the humor into words, it stopped being as funny.

Back to dreams. Sometimes you dream things that are big and scary. Part of the bigness and scariness is that they are dark and undefined. Well, if you put into words the big, scary, undefinable thing, you are defining it. This doesn’t work so well in math; unfortunately no matter how much you talk 1 divided by 0 is undefined. However, putting something big and scary into mere English takes away part of the scariness. This is similar to explaining a joke.

Once you’ve faced something frightening, you can move on. You have looked at the big ugly thing frankly, and it may still be scary. But in my opinion, constantly having a big scary something lurking in your mind gives too much power to the big scary something.

On Dreams:

Dreams are weird. One minute, you’re dreaming about pizza, and the next minute you’re engaged to your cat. Personally, I hate the dreams when I can’t find my contacts and everything is fuzzy. I’m not sure what dreams mean. Sometimes they are random, and sometimes they reflect my stress level, and many times I don’t even remember them. Sometimes things happen in my dreams that make me wonder what is going on in the old sub-conscious. And sometimes they are a mash-up of random things I saw and heard during the day. One thing I hate: when dreams are so life-like that later I can’t remember if something happened or if I just dreamt it. I don’t know enough about dreaming to be able to give a conclusion on what they mean. People seem to like to know what things mean. All I know is this: dreams are weird.

On Big Mind/ Little Mind

There are numerous ways to occupy my little mind so that my big mind can get going. I have a lot of ways to get ready to write. Or, really, to do anything. Usually I like to read, or exercise, or play the piano.

But writing is hard. First you must establish an idea. Here’d the deal: ideas that satisfy your little mind are hard to come by. At least for me. You see, my little mind is a rather conflicted person. Sometimes, she’s very encouraging and anything I write is s to the weet. Sometimes, she’s a really mean literary critic that thinks that all ideas ever are either bad or overdone and usually both. Usually, she goes back and forth so fast that the slope is undefined. So, I usually tell her that I’m just writing for fun and that she can take it easy. Once she takes it easy, I start writing. When I start writing, sometimes I have a really random off-topic idea. These are usually the ideas that I like the best.

                                              Graph of Little Mind during Pre-Writing