Perhaps a Shining City
Why do we create?
A dream awakens me from a dead sleep, its sounds like vapors I can barely touch with my fingertips. In a bleary moment, it will be gone.
What is my first urge? To share it.
Okay, that’s not entirely reasonable. I can’t wake up everyone in the house. I can’t text a friend at… what?… two in the morning. And yet, this overwhelming desire to grasp that mysterious snippet—that ambiguous doorway into my subconscious—is at the very root of my creativity.
And yours.
No wonder we try to pin it down, to call it back from the misty mountains where it has threatened to slip away, to be heard from no more. It wants to leave us, but we refuse to let it go.
We want to build a city with it. Perhaps a shining city, with a great arch that welcomes visitors from far and wide. Perhaps a place we will never want to leave, ever again.
But this is madness. Of course we’ll want to leave! We have things to do, people to see.
Right?
I’m not quite sure we’re all on the same page regarding the desire to return from the dream-state. Look at how many books, films and plays we engage with… how many fictional worlds we enter with passion, with abandon, with glee. How were those worlds created? Who owns them? Do they become part of the zeitgeist, a shared vision of a world separate from everyday reality? Do we live in these dreams together, or apart? And, if every single one of us is capable of dreaming, then why does it feel so lonely to dream?
Perhaps it’s the creeping awareness that our minds can create something over which we have no real control. We can remember our dreams, but nothing more: we can’t un-dream. Is dreaming a form of madness, then? And, taking this idea a step further… what of writing fiction? Is the act of creating a story simply a form of controlled insanity, a conscious attempt to recreate the subconscious?
Forgive me, dear reader, if I am waxing philosophical. Blame it on Book Two, that as-yet-unwritten novel swirling around my head. It will be historical fiction (again), like Folio, and I will be obliged to commit a significant amount of time to it. To think. To dream. The last time I wandered down this particular (and somewhat dubious) road, the whole effort took a decade. Ten long years of blind alleys. Inconsistent “facts”. Characters who stubbornly (and studiously!) refused to do as I say… all the while sensing the winged feet of time whisking my precious life away.
Am I ready? Could anyone be ready for that?
And, if the dream becomes a nightmare, will it be time well spent? Who am I to burden another person with dark imagery? It’s a chance I have to take. I hear the voices of my dream, and I choose to follow the siren song. I can hope, as my dream tumbles forth in the ink-dark night, that I am only one small citizen in a global community of dreamers.
So many of us, in fact, we could populate a city.
One that shines.