Highly unusual: A garage-inspired path of thought but in the early morning. And, with an unlit dipped-in-arrow-lacquer cigarette to satisfy my oral craving, much to my husband’s dismay.
This–and not original at all, but sometimes when one stumbles upon it all by oneself even after having read and believed to be understood–that dreams are the natural magical realism of story. The black bear we watch cautiously in our dreams as he looms outside our window; and then comes up for a chat. The house that has no doorways, yet we find ourself within and then without. The people who we do not recognize throughout an episode turn into our sister just as we awake (or as in reality, vice versa).
These are the more perplexing of dreams; those that seem so grounded in surrounding or characters, yet turn on a dime with something so out of place that is so normally accepted in our dreamworld. Verisimilitude at work here, in a place we have created without the taint of pompous conscious thought to say, that just can’t happen.
How can we learn to let these worlds, these parallel worlds that are seen by different parts of our brain in different ways become more dominant–or at least accessible, as dominant would soon see us in a barred windowed-building–so that we can write them from that viewpoint without our reality editor kicking in? It is symbolism, no doubt, as the subconscious does not see things that the conscious mind does not; but sees it differently.
This is what I need to learn. To think as if in dreaming, and then to kick off the restraints that would negate the experience to something less than real. For real is only what you make it, and nothing is really true to all.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology