Storytellersunplugged

Stop me before I kill again.

I’m going to do it, yes, I am, I’m really going to do it. Going to write about another obscure topic so ephemeral that I don’t know if I can pull it off. You may have noticed that I shy away from the easy stuff – practical stuff with practical answers. Not that those things aren’t invaluable – they are – but all the sane and successful writers in this blog do an admirable job with those tangible aspects of writing. You need someone like me (big head, small brain) to even attempt romantic idealism beyond the five senses (January), keeping the faith (December), or Stage 3 Suffocation (November). And right now my brain is rolling around in my head like a bell clapper, so here I go, rushing in where angels fear to tread. To top it off, let me make this a Cannibal Essay. For those of you new to this column, those are essays that attempt to connect mundane living with inspired writing, some examples being: 09-16-06 KY JELLY & THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL; 12-16-06 THOMAS SULLIVAN: KHAKI MAN & THE PEANUT BUTTER PLAYERS; and 01-16-07 THOMAS SULLIVAN: EMPTY BOXES I HAVE WORN. The subject this time is as nebulous as dreams. In fact, it is dreams. Real, middle-of-the-night, full snooze dreams.

Are dreams produced by your life or is your life, at least in part, a product of your dreams? I thought I knew the answer to that when a young man (Mike Nielsen) recently asked me a question about writing and dreams. Dreams are the mind’s way of defragging the brain’s emotional computer, I thought. They do not project the future, unless you are Madam Swami charging 30 shekels a minute on the call-in Dream Channel or a Biblical king consulting his soothsayers. Nor are they part of the active creative process for a writer, Xanadu and opium stoners like Coleridge excepted. Or so I thought. And then that night I had a dream…

This one, right on the border of waking, lent itself to full analysis. It was ripe with elements of my life, past and present, but it also contained strong hints of things in process, pointers to the future, if you will, and even more than that: things presented in a way that I have trained myself to use as a writer. Hmmm. Going to need an example/sample here, right? Thought I could sashay past that without anyone noticing, lest it get too personal, but this is too general. Okay. I shall throw my virginal soul into the volcano. A little. Here is an air-brushed version of the dream:

The walls around me are mist, as they often are when I am about to go somewhere in a sleep fantasy. I have a vague sense that I need to get a ride to a swimming meet. The fact that in real life I sometimes hitchhiked to swim meets to compete blends easily into this anxiety. In this dream there are people offering me rides, but the drivers are either dead or impossible. One is a former teammate killed in a motorcycle accident, another a piano player friend from another part of my past, yet another my father who never saw me swim. All are gone from my life. The effort of bringing my father back conjures up a rental flat where we once lived in another state. I am standing in the upper story of an old house with wooden window casements now when a bird tries to carry something off the ledge in its talons. This, too, is evoked by realities, because the creature’s nails scrabbling outside the kitchen window stab me with guilt. A thoughtless adolescent who looks a lot like me once greased that ledge with Crisco and sprinkled peanuts on it to watch the squirrels skid and dance when they jumped from the nearest eave. I hang my head in shame but am happy to report that no animals were injured in the making of this dream or its sponsoring events from the past. Anyway, in the dream a female comes alongside me in the kitchen and I open the window. The bird tries to fly off and the woman grabs for whatever it is clutching in its talons, getting an edge of the thing. I help her pull it in against an immense force, an energy that suggests a memory resisting exposure. The object is fading in our grasp when suddenly the bird lets go and we pull the prize inside, slamming the window shut. It is a checkbook. The woman I’m with insists it is something else, but I can see my ex’s name on the top check where it is written in smudged ink. And then the bird is back on the ledge, fluttering its wings and looking very distraught.

And here is where the dream goes from sorting out old debris in the warehouse of my mind to the present and future tense. I know this because it borrows things I have been actively creating in the staging area of my brain and takes them further. It ceases using identifiable components of my emotional past and enters the arena of pure creativity. In a sense, I awaken within my sleep and begin thinking outside myself. Returning you now to the dream…

…we take the bird in but grip it tightly because it is a wily thief. But a thief of what? I remember asking myself that question in the dream. I am definitely thinking like a writer now. The woman and I carry the bird out of the house, along a sidewalk and a path and eventually along a railroad track. Somewhere in transit I become aware that I am carrying, not a bird, but a human being, a young girl who is trying to get back on an “orphan train.” Orphan trains were the brainchild of Rev. Charles Loring Brace as an answer to the problem of 34,000 homeless waifs on the streets of New York City in 1854. The trains ran for 75 years, carrying about 200,000 children from eastern cities into the heartland of America where they were adopted at little more than whistle-stops in a fashion reminiscent of auction blocks. I have used that theme before in my writing and am currently doing so again. But to finish the dream…

The avian girl is restored now, and the woman and I let her go. A train whistles in the distance with a terrible significance that has something to do with time but is as elusive as a wisp of color in a rolling marble. The young girl wanders sadly toward the mournful sound, stopping to look at something, a flower perhaps, as if to delay her return, reluctant, unsure. But the whistle is relentless and when it becomes an insistent scream blasting through the mist, she wanders a few more steps and fades into the past…

I awaken for real now with a sense of finality too pat to have punctuated a random dream. This was the writer me engaged in creation – a not un-dreamlike state where I become sort of cosmic, seeing with a third eye that takes in three dimensions as if they are portals to higher consciousness. The higher consciousness is rife with symbols and themes and underlying meanings that I control rather than having them control me. Do I dream like this all the time? I don’t know. It may be that the young man who posed the question about dreaming and writing stirred awareness of the process. In any event, it has reaffirmed my conviction that a lot of creativity takes place subconsciously, whether actually dreaming in sleep or seemingly occupied with other waking thoughts. Can you kick-start that process? I believe you can. I think it’s more or less natural but that we get distracted from it. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that most of creativity takes place subconsciously. The conscious brain simply sifts through the associations that pop up from underlying currents that you can tap into. It looks for things that are relevant to what it is trying to create. It makes a decision on what to use, and you can call that creativity, but it’s the subconscious that is supplying all the possibilities. You may disagree with my semantics here, but the important consideration for the writer – if I’ve correctly described a process of creating – is how to connect or stimulate the two (conscious and subconscious) to work together. How do you start the associations flowing? I thought you’d never ask.

You ask yourself the right questions.

Asking the right questions of your life is like turning a compost pile to generate heat and transformation. Once you are vexed with a problem, the subconscious goes to work. It dredges up all kinds of associations in any number of ways having to do with both style and content. It could be “what ifs” or personal experiences or a range of possible verbal expressions or close matches of specific events, attributes and ideas in your memory. I try never to disengage from a ms without asking myself what the next problem to solve is. Maybe this is what Hemingway called leaving something in the well. And, oh yeah, the process I’m describing requires one other thing.

A vacuum.

If you really want to stimulate your inner resources, give them a vacuum to fill. Do it every day. Your brain will scream, thrash, beg you for distraction, but do not feed the monkey on your back. Give it a vacuum. It will go nuts looking for an escape, and eventually it will have to turn inward. It will do it while you are driving a car and the radio is off, or when you are walking up a flight of stairs, or when you are waiting for the waiter to bring your dinner, or even when you are dreaming.

Helps to avoid the numbing aspects of life around you. Meaningless conversations, spectatorship, creature comforts, negativity – all qualify as things that can anesthetize your imagination. Serene settings, still beauty, physical rhythms that leave your mind unfettered can work for you. Try it. Try it regularly. Live there for a while, alone, with nothing to distract you from yourself. You’ll never go back full-time to civilization, socialization, or any whatever-izations you were in that caused you to be divorced from yourself in the first place. Trust that there is a great person inside you with a great mind and a great soul. Get in touch with that person daily. If you’re trying to be creative, you really have to do that, unless you’re so good that you can create with half your brain tied behind your back.

I’ve tried to dissect the intangibles of the creative process in other essays about attitudes, habits and environment. I strongly believe that most people have multiple resources within them and that what emerges or gets suppressed is a matter of choice. It may be an unconscious choice, due to lifestyle, but that’s just another way of saying that the more you think about your life, the more control you gain over it. I am always impressed by how adaptable we all are. You can’t look at history or the great array of contrasting cultures and not see that. We are conditioned from the cradle by our surroundings, but at some point we each have the option of seizing control of that, of conditioning ourselves. A need for something – freedom, truth, security – is going to trump whatever was grafted onto you and drive you to a point of individuality where you can be your happiest and most satisfied. If you want to be a writer, the key thing isn’t mere literacy, it’s thinking outside the box you live in, grew up in, the one that says you are like everyone else in your place and times. That box. You are not like everyone else. Or rather you are like everyone else only to the extent to which you choose to be, consciously or unconsciously. I shaved this morning. I shoveled the driveway, put on clothes (well… I put on clothes BEFORE I shoveled the drive), kept my speed below Mach 1 and obeyed all traffic lights on the way to a store, and smiled politely at people (Minnesota nice). But there was a subtext going on in my mind of observation and expression that is uniquely me all the while. And I’ll pretty much fill the well that feeds it with things that inspire, challenge, fulfill and grow me all day long. Most importantly, I’ll find an atmosphere that supports this as much as possible where I can come fully alive. These are choices and now habits I’ve come by that keep my circuit board lit. Thinking is the most important thing I do. I mean really thinking. I am not passive. I am active. They say you burn more calories sleeping than watching TV. Maybe that’s not so much a put-down of the vegetable state as it is an endorsement of what happens when your mind takes center-stage as in dreaming.

Now that doesn’t guarantee I am worth anything or that I add up to anything more than a waste of skin, but it does let me be as creative as I can be. And it keeps me free. If nothing else, I am a stand-alone product. What a lucky coincidence, since I am in a stand-alone business. The classic meditator is the guru, the esthetic who goes to the mountain top, the Christ who wanders the wilderness for 40 days. That is essentially a creative state, a search to express inner truth to oneself. How fortunate writers are to have an occupation where they do that all their waking hours. Waking hours? Revise, edit! Not just waking hours but dreaming too. So make that 24/7. When you become so habituated to thinking creatively that it permeates even your dreams, you know you are through and through the creative person you chose to be.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website. My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds. I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Older newsletters are now being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/