Writing in a dream state: More real than real

  • By Mike Dewey
  • January 23, 2011
  • 366
                        
At first, I figured it was simply a rather unbelievable symptom of the head cold I've been dealing with the last few days; it is, without a doubt, of the Five-Star variety. Coughing and sneezing, coupled with chills and fever, accompanied by aching muscles. It's not something I've treated with anything other than generic aspirin, because I subscribe to my mother's theory that a cold like this one is a week coming, a week with you and a week going away. There's nothing common about the common cold, though, especially when you consider that over the centuries, no one's figured a way to cure it. I haven't changed my eating habits -- "Feed a cold and starve a fever" or is it the other way around? -- and aside from an occasional dram of Tennessee's finest over ice, my beverage behavior is unaltered. It is true, however, that I'm lowering myself into a hot bath almost every night, as opposed to my usual afternoon showers, but that's because its tends to ward off the chills and sooth my sore body. But here's what's been happening lately and I don't know why. Several times last week, while in a dream state, I found myself reading words behind my eyelids, full sentences, complete paragraphs. And it wasn't just one. There seemed to be an endless supply of them. This is so difficult to describe, I'm just going share one of the very few that I've managed to maintain. Bear in mind that all I did was read the words ... this wasn't a typical dream with images. It went something like this: BEGIN ITALICS... "Fascinating," said my husband, channeling his inner Spock and raising his right eyebrow. "Yes, it is," I said, placing my briefcase and laptop on the kitchen table while he continued to chop onions and garlic, mushrooms and green peppers for his special spaghetti sauce. Because we were celebrating. That morning, after three long weeks, I'd finally gotten the teaching job at the local community college, which suddenly made our move from the city to the coast a lot easier. "Any idea what your class load's going to be?" my husband asked after a nice hug. "Or is it too early for that?" I braced myself. "Only one that I'm sure of," I said. "It's called How to Get Published." He stopped his knife in mid-air, his face a question mark. "Did I miss something?" he asked. "No," I said. "So you're still trying to get published," he said. "That's unusual, isn't it?" I nodded. "Well, Chuck thinks ..." Both of my husband's eyebrows rose, a Venetian blind effect. "Chuck?" he asked. "Dr. Robertson," I began again, referring to the department chairman, "thinks that my students could actually get more out of the course when it's being taught by someone who's going through what's being presented." My husband went back to this chopping. "Live long and publish," he said. END ITALICS OK., OK, I know it's not very good, but that's not the point. I read those words, more or less intact, in my sleep. Is it the beginning or in the middle? How would I know? All I know is there they were. I have no idea who these people are and I'd never considered writing from a woman's point of view ... but I have to admit that when I came fully awake, I enjoyed playing around the characters I'd imagined and maybe creating new ones. Weird. And, as I say, this is merely one of dozens of -- What to call them? Dream words -- that I've read recently. I can't explain how it works. It's not like I'm sitting there, turning actual pages. It's more like a Kindle, an electronic reading device, where pages are turned with the touch of a button. Where are all these words coming from and why is it happening now? I think everyone's done this: Before the last vestiges of a dream faded, you grab a pen and paper and jot down what you can remember ... but when you look at it later, it's words ... and you can't bring back what it was all about. I felt something akin to that sensation of irrevocable loss the other morning as I tried to think of a way to capture the words my mind had shared. It was a useless enterprise and all I could think of to compare it to was trying to take a perfect spider web you'd discovered under an eave and transport it into the house. But all you'd be left with would be a sticky mess: no magic, no mystery, just matter. I know that this won't last and sooner or later, when my fever breaks, my dreams will return to their regularly scheduled programming. Can I actually claim those words, since I didn't actually write them, in the traditional sense? Keith Richards famously was asleep when he came up with the riff for "Satisfaction," which propelled the Rolling Stones into stardom. He woke up, turned on his cassette recorder, played the chords and promptly passed out. He has no memory of how it came to him. It was just there. I'm not comparing my work to his ... I'm not that stupid. But I think I know a little bit about what happened in that hotel room in Florida. I wonder if he had a cold at the time. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.


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