Advice on writing

Go to the palace of the winds
where the curtains flutter like butterfly wings;
play the orchestra of your heartstrings.
Step out of your busy days
into a more spacious time.
Make friends again with your other self
who has been writing the novels you haven't read
and let him create through your fingers.

Go to the Gare du Nord in the shadow of war
and kiss her again: the lovely dark-haired woman
you have loved in more than one life.
As the sweetness of black and red berries
explodes on your tongue, filling your senses,
make sure you get her on the train
to safety in a country far from here
while you go underground to fight the crooked cross
and write the journal that will fill a novel
in the future you are living now.

Pick up the trail of the happy hooker
who parted company with you at the customs check -
vivid and succulent in her sables,
unburdened by all her Louis Vuitton luggage -
and was treated like royalty while you were grilled.
She blew you kisses and cried, "We'll meet again, darling!"
She is the part of you that is shameless but selective,
who'll put out only for the richest of prizes.
Make a date to play with her.
Let her wear the fox fur this time
before she disrobes in silken stages
and calls you to breathe her sweetness, to graze on her slopes
and transform her, through your attentions, into a lively Muse.
You lost her when you were full of rights and wrongs
and fell into spiritual correctness and forgot
that the spirits must always be entertained.

Follow your laughing, sexy Muse when she leads you down
to the boxes of good and bad and reminds you
that creators aren't moralists and must take from both.
Lean back, be loose, let her pleasure your palate
with wild strawberries and blackberries warm from the sun
and juice you to write the new story
of old gods and heroes: of the strong man of the green island
who was trained by a stronger woman
and ruined by the spite of an insatiable queen;
of the seer of the North whose eyes are two ravens
and was a shaman before he became a god
by hanging on the One Tree, offering himself to himself;
of the Sisters of the Stones, whose internet
is the humming of bees, and whose sanctuary is in amber.

Free the desk that is your door
of work and fossils, of old drafts;
plot with toy soldiers and colored pencils,
smoke cigars with Mark Twain and Winston,
play the music that stirs your blood.
Mornings, let the novelist who is now at home in you
leave the bed before you, to sit in your chair
and tap your characters awake with busy fingers
as the old priest of Ifa in his leopard skin
wakes the divination gods with his tapper
to cast the patterns that start the game of the world again.


Photo: Mirror for a Writer in Amsterdam (R.M.)

When the Dreamer Must Be Stronger than the Dream

 

Victor Hugo’s creative work was driven by dreaming to a remarkable degree. In a curious essay titled Promontorium somnii (The Headland of Dreams) written shortly after Les Miserables, he remarks, "The dreamer must be stronger than the dream". Il faut que le songeur soit plus fort que le songe. 

Hugo is not talking about trying to put the little ego in charge of the dreamstate. He is talking about our need to find a navigator within ourselves than can enable us to sail through the wreckage of dreams and plans that broke on the reefs, through the fog of despair and the will-of-the-wisps of illusion, to find and claim a bigger dream. He is also talking about the need to avoid falling over the edge of madness, when hurled into the "expanding spiral of the self". Hugo was keenly alive to the risk, since he saw both his brother and his daughter confined to mental asylums. He observes in the same essay that "sleep is not a formal necessity for dreams". 

Hugo journaled his dreams and they are central to some of his novels, especially Le Travailleurs de la mer [translated as "Toilers of the Sea"] and L’Homme qui rit and to poems including “Booz endormit” (which I discovered many years ago because of a dream of my own Boaz as a sleeping king with a tree growing out of his lower body) and “La Pente de la reverie”.

“The dream is the aquarium of the night,” Hugo writes in Toilers of the Sea, which contains an astonishing account of how realities are created from subtle “stuff” that “floats in dreams”. As the fluid forms that rise and fall in the night aquarium become fixed, "beings emerge".-

Victor Hugo also said, “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” To fulfill the bold promise of that statement in our lives, we again need to heed the caution that the dreamer may need to be stronger than the dream. Dreams lay a path for manifestation. However, we want to avoid succumbing to a sense of fatality as the elements of our dreams - good or bad - start to play out in physical life. Dreams open paths, and show us possible futures. As we walk those paths, we must never give up our power to choose, and remain conscious how we are choosing.

At a couple of important passages in my life, stunned by how exactly waking events were replicating incidents in a dream, I behaved like an actor following a prepared script (one with some missing lines, however) - and lost important opportunities by abandoning my power to improvise and be present in the shifting moment. I have observed other dreamers weighed down by a sense of fatality about "bad" dreams that they feel are going to play out, thereby setting a course for the rocks. I have seen dreamers who clung to bright dreams of romance and success but failed to do all that was required to ground and nurture those dreams in the world - or saw part of those beautiful dreams unfold, only to be shattered. Out of such wreckage, once again, the dreamer is challenged to be stronger than the dream - to reach to a wiser and deeper self to find the power to sail on, into a bigger dream.

Illustration: A caricature of Victor Hugo by Bertall, titled "Une salade dans un crâne" ("A Salad in the Head").

Dreaming in Greeneland

When I first traveled to Paris as a foreign correspondent, early in the 1970s, the office secretary made a reservation for me at the St James Albany, which turned out to be twin hotels - very handsome Right Bank townhouses - separated by a quiet courtyard with a fountain and flagstones and flowerbeds and shade trees. It struck me that the courtyard between the twin hotels was a liminal space, ideal for intrigue and trespass of various kinds – for games involving lovers, or spies, even players from different worlds. 

     I later discovered, to my great delight, that Graham Greene had similar feelings and had made this location a part of Greeneland, the fictive world of his novels. He used the courtyard of the St James Albany as the setting for a hilarious scene in Travels with My Aunt in which two women, meeting by chance, discuss the lovers with whom they tryst in secret in each of the twin hotels - and then discover that their lovers are the same man when M. Dambreuse arrives with his wife and children.

     Graham Greene led many lives, but first and last he was a writer, with a professional writer’s discipline. Through his many intrigues, both personal and political, he managed to sit down almost every day from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. – on a veranda in Tahiti or a cottage in Brighton – and knock out his quota of 500 words, and he did this for seventy years, producing a steady stream of popular novels and essays.
     A crucial part of Greene’s practice was to write down his dreams. He started keeping a dream journal when he was sixteen. He often reported his dreams in letters to lovers and friends. Over the last twenty-five years of his life, he recorded his dreams with great faithfulness – though in fiendishly difficult handwriting – in notebooks that are now in an archive in Texas. His last literary project was to edit a selection of his dreams for a posthumous collection he titled A World of My Own.

     The interweaving of Greene’s dream life with his other lives makes a fascinating study, for which the primary source materials are unusually extensive.  We see how a man who chose to live on the dangerous edges of the world was able to create – richly and repeatedly – from the borderlands of dreaming. We can track many different modes in which a writer can create from dreams, from receiving the initial idea for a story, to solving a problem during sleep, to bridging a narrative gap, to dreaming deep into a character’s life.

     As a young boy, he had psychic dreams, often involving death by water, a prospect that terrified him. On the night the Titanic sank, when he was just seven, he dreamed of a shipwreck, with a man in oilskins bent double beside a companionway under the blow of a great wave. 

     He was miserable at school – nothing unusual in the lives of creative and sensitive individuals – and ran away when he was sixteen. This was highly embarrassing for the family, since Graham’s father was headmaster. They decided to send him to London to be psychoanalyzed, which was still a novel idea in 1920, especially for a teenage boy. The analyst selected, Kenneth Richmond, had no formal training; he was a writer with spiritualist leanings who followed an eclectic approach.
     While Greene was boarding with him in Lancaster Gate, Richmond instructed him to write down his dreams. In mid-morning sessions, Greene was expected to tell a dream and then give his associations to the key images while the analyst merely listened. When Greene did not recall a dream, he made something up. The whole experience – which he later described as the happiest six months of his life  – laid the foundation for Greene’s literary career by training him to write from dreams and invent stories. 

      Kenneth Richmond’s beautiful wife Zoe – about whom Greene had mildly erotic dreams – thought Graham was clairvoyant, “a natural medium”. While in Lancaster Gate, Greene dreamed of a ship going down in the Irish Sea. That same night, just after midnight, the Rowan sank in the Irish Sea. 

      In some of his precognitive or clairvoyant dreams, he found himself in the situation of one of the victims. Aged twenty-one, he dreamed of another shipboard disaster in which he was being ordered to jump overboard from an upper deck. He later read the news of a terrible wreck in a storm off the Yorkshire coast in which the captain ordered his men to jump into the violent sea, and all but two were drowned. Greene speculated that “on an occasion like this there must be terrific mental waves of terror, and my mind seems to be particularly attuned to the terror of drowning wave.”

     His youthful psychic ability to dream his way into someone else’s situation resembled his mature ability as a novelist to dream his way into his characters’ lives. He later observed that “sometimes identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one’s own.” 

     Greene’s dreams were central to his writing. He said that two of his novels, It’s a Battlefield and The Honorary Consul, both started with dreams. He dreamed the plots and characters of entire short stories. When he was writing A Burnt-Out Case – which drew heavily on his diary of a trip to the Congo – Greene came to a point in the plot where he was stuck. Then the author dreamed as his character, Querry, and found he could insert his dream “without change” in the novel, “where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross.” 

     Greene made it a habit to solve writing problems in his sleep, noting that it is not necessary to remember the content of a dream in order to receive a dream-inspired solution. “When an obstacle seems insurmountable, I read the day’s work before sleep…When I wake the obstacle has nearly always been removed: the solution is there and obvious – perhaps it came in a dream which I have forgotten.” 

      He harvested personal dreams and assigned them to characters in his novels. In a  dream reflecting his lifelong preoccupation with religion, he gave a lecture on the theme that God evolves, as well as man, and that behind their apparent duality, God and Satan are one. He later transferred this theory to a passage in The Honorary Consul where his character explains that God has a “night-side” as well as a “day-side”; the night-side will wither away (“like your communist state, Eduardo”) as God and man both evolve. 

   Graham Greene was a man of mystery who had much to hide, in his private life and in his engagement with the worlds of power and espionage. For him the great mystery, at the end, concerned what follows death. He thought – and dreamed – about this all his life. He was greatly affected by a series of dream encounters with his father after his death. 

   Greene had a disturbing dream that he might be extinguished after death through lack of belief. “I had been aware of people I had loved who called me to join them. But I had chosen, by my lack of belief, extinction. A great black cone like a candle extinguisher was to be dropped over my head.” 

     But he did not go out like that. He left sure of continuing life, ready for new travels, regretting only separation from the last woman to share his life, Yvonne Cloetta.

    A week before his death, knowing it was at hand, he said to Yvonne in the hospital at Vevey: “It may be an interesting experience; at last I shall know what lies on the other side of the fence.” 

Towards the end, he made this note in Yvonne’s “red book” of their conversations: “Perhaps in Paradise we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a place of activity. Sometimes I pray not for the dead friends but to dead friends, asking their help.” 

Yvonne recalls that “He worked every morning, as he always did, right up to the end, on his book of dreams.” Evidently he came to believe that through dreams (as one of his characters said in a different connection) “there was something in the warring crooked uncertain world he could trust beside himself.”

Adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

A Dreamer's Notes: Library Night with Borges

What’s missing from Edwin Williamson’s long biography of Jorge Luis Borges (Borges: A Life) are the dreams. There’s mention of an early and recurring nightmare, in which Borges does not know where he is or who he is, a dream that may have anticipated his blindness but extends to his existential condition. There are a couple of references to nightmares in his later years – of being terrified by a dream that oppressed him in a book-lined basement in a professor’s house in East Lansing, so he had to be moved to a hotel; of a terrible dream in which he is crucified and glimpses a she-wolf as his oppressor. But nothing, really, about the dreams that may have inspired and fueled the poems and stories.

Did Borges really dream only on paper? If so, this might account for his uncertainty about whether there is an afterlife, something that weighed on him into his final days. His father – who went blind long before him – sometimes spoke of his longing for death in the sense of being totally “extinguished”. Borges, bitterly and recurringly rejected by women and disappointed in love, and tied to the clumsy body of a failing, eventually sightless animal, also yearned for this, and often thought of suicide. Feeling close to his own death, three years after the death of his boyhood friend from Geneva, Maurice Abramowicz, Borges wrote 

I cannot tell whether you are still someone
I cannot tell whether you can hear me [“Elegy”]

Yet the next year in a Greek taverna in Geneva, when a certain song was playing, Borges experienced an epiphany. The song declared that while the music played, you could enjoy the love of Helen of Troy; while the music played, Ulysses could go home to Ithaca. In this moment, Borges knew that Maurice was alive and present, and raised his glass in a toast to his friend. “Tonight I can weep like a man,” he wrote that same night, “ because I know there is not a single thing on this earth which is mortal and which does not project its shadow. Tonight you have told me without words, Abramowicz, that we should enter death as we might enter a fiesta.” [“Abramowicz” in Los Conjurados]

Borges was now released to imagine – in a burst of visionary optimism after all the black despair – a world created by dreamers. In his prose poem “Someone Shall Dream” (“Alguien sonara”) the future “shall dream dreams more vivid than our waking life today. It shall dream that we can work miracles, and that we won’t carry them out because it will be more real to imagine them. It shall dream worlds so intense that the voice of a single bird could kill us.” 

A Library Date with Borges

I have dreamed of Borges, and these dreams are very much the dreams of a writer and bookman, as you might expect. During a visit to Barcelona, I picked up copies of a couple of Spanish-language editions of books by Borges and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares and leafed through them on a sunny hotel terrace during siesta time. That night, Borges called me, as he had promised in a previous dream, to his ideal library. In that well-upholstered space, he appeared in his prime, no longer blind, beautifully dressed. He gave me a personal seminar on the art of the short story, drawing on his own experience of writing three drafts of a story. “Each,” he remarked, “had merits and demerits.

The story was "The Secret Miracle", that dark jewel in which a Jewish playwright who has been sentenced to death by a Nazi official in occupied Prague is granted his wish for a year to complete an unfinished play. The world around him is frozen as he spends a year of mental time on this work. When he finds the last word the bullets are released from the barrels of the firing squad. The story contains two remarkable dreams within its own oneiric logic.

“My first draft had the most passion,” Borges told me. “The third was the most technically accomplished. It is essential not to lose the passion in the developing craft.”

Illustration: "Library Date" by RM with AI assistance

Writers dreaming, dreamers writing

 

Writing and dreaming are closely related as daily practice. Writers who keep journals and record their dreams are giving themselves a warm-up, flexing the creative muscles that will work on the larger project. Writers who may not record their dreams with any regularity nonetheless rise from sleep with their heads full of words – as Dickens related in a letter to a certain Dr Stone – that are pressing to come out.

A writer’s dream may help to “break up the great fountains of the deep” (a phrase Mark Twain used repeatedly) releasing the power of long-buried memories, or bringing through ideas that have been growing in the preconscious or the deeper unconscious for years or decade. That is how Aslan came to C.S. Lewis, giving him the key to Narnia.

As Lewis recalled

The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my head since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’

At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him. 

Yeats was inspired by a dream to write his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. As he wrote in 1908:

One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage, there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I could make others see my dream as I had seen it.

In dreams and flow states that writers come into contact with inner helpers. Robert Louis Stevenson communed with his “Brownies” in states of reverie, and gave them the credit for doing better than half his literary work. Yeats spoke of the “mingling of minds” that can bring assistance, in a creative venture, from intelligences that seem to belong to other times or other dimensions .

Milton described the source of his inspiration as

....my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated prose [Paradise Lost IX. 21-4]

Milton spoke of “being milked” after his nights of inspiration, as – totally blind by the time he composed his most famous work – he dictated to a scribe.

When they are truly “on”, many writers experience the sense that they have entered a creative partnership with a larger power, a power the ancients used to call the genius or the eudaimon (the good demon). Some writers develop the ability to enter a certain kind of imaginal space – call it the Dream Library – where such encounters are easy; we do this regularly in my own creative writing retreats.

 

Calling in the Brownies: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dream Helpers

The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) described dreams as occurring in "that small theater of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long."

     Stevenson said of his now classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was "conceived, written, re-written, re-re-written, and printed inside ten weeks" in 1886. The conception came in a dream:

    "For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers."

     His wife related picturesquely how one night e cried out horror-stricken, how she woke him up and he protested, "Why did you waken me? I was dreaming a fine bogy-tale!" She also related how he appeared the next morning excitedly exclaiming, "I have got my schilling-shocker -- I have got my schilling-shocker!"

     Stevenson wrote extensively about how his passion for writing interacted with his remarkable dreams and said that, from an early age, his dreams were so vivid and moving that they were more entertaining to him personally than any literature. He learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books.

    Stevenson described the central role of dreaming and dreamlike states in his creative process in “A Chapter on Dreams”. During his sickly childhood, he was often oppressed by night terrors and the “night hag”.  But as he grew older, he found that his dreams often became welcome adventures, in which he would travel to far-off places or engage in costume dramas among the Jacobites.

     He often read stories in his dreams, and as he developed the ambition to become a writer, it dawned on him that a clever way to get his material would be to transcribe what he was reading in his sleep. “When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales.” And his dream producers accommodated him. He noticed they became especially industrious when he was under a tight deadline. When “the bank begins to send letters” his “sleepless Brownies” work overtime, turning out marketable stories.

     In his “Chapter on Dreams” (written in his house on Saranac Lake in upstate New York and published in Across the Plains) RLS gave a vivid depiction of his dream helpers.

     “Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim…

     “And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”

     He observed that  “my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the supernatural – and have no morals at all.”

The mists at sunrise whispered his name. It is exciting for me that Stevenson wrote his "Chapter on Dreams", as well as some of his most-loved fiction, in a cottage on Saranac Lake in upstate New York. After I started dreaming of people who lived in that area - traditional Mohawk country - in the 1700s, I watched the sun burn the mist off that lake in the early morning. And I suddenly knew the meaning of the name of a Mohawk Bear Clan warrior who has featured in my dreams. He was one of the four "Indian kings" invited to London in 1710. His portrait by the court artist Verelst is on the cover of my novel The Interpreter. The colonial scribes rendered his name as Sayenqueraghta. I knew now that it means Vanishing Smoke. My vision at the lake was part of a rich and complex interaction with spirits of the land from which I wrote the most powerful chapters The Interpreter. The engagement carried me further: to find and follow the path of a dream teacher for which there was no career track in modern society,

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

What's birthing in Berkeley Square

I am in an elegant Georgian square in London. The garden area at the center of the square has been covered by an immense tarp. It is rising as whatever is beneath it swells and steams. What is this? An immense heap of manure?
    The smell is loamy and rich. This may be the mother of all piles of crap, but I am sure that something wonderful is about to happen. It feels like the Earth herself is in process of giving birth, within this defined and mannerly space. I picture a natural spring that becomes a jetting fountain, surrounded by lush beds of flowers and flowering trees.

Feelings on waking before dawn today: cheerful, positive. Sure I can get my new book together.

Reality check: I think the location was Berkeley Square. I am going to another Berkeley, in California, this week. The book I am currently completing includes an account of my adventures and misadventures when I was engaged in researching and writing historical novels set in the Georgian era. Fictional characters who were given homes on Berkeley Square include Bertie Wooster and Flashman (a distant model for the narrator of my novel Fire Along the Sky). 

Defining the space: As I think about what is birthing in my dream, my eye falls on a quote from Reshad Feild, sent to me in an old letter: "In alchemy it is stated that whenever we define the space for which we are responsible, everything is given us within that space. It is as if the whole universe comes down and sits at our feet...ready to be used for God's plan on earth."

"When I am dreaming, it's being written inside"

I am savoring some recollections of the role of dreaming in a writer's life in the last long interview that Julio Cortazar, an Argentine master of magical realism and the short story form, gave before his death. He describes how an early story that earned him fame was inspired by a nightmare. "One of my first and most popular stories, “House Taken Over” [Casa Tomada], is a nightmare I had. I got up immediately and wrote it."
    More usually, before he began to write, Cortazar would have felt a story "turning around in me a long time, sometimes for weeks...During this gestation period my dreams are full of references and allusions to what is going to be in the story. Sometimes the whole story is in a dream... But in general, what comes out of the dreams are fragments of references. That is, my subconscious is in the process of working through a story—when I am dreaming, it’s being written inside there." 

Quotations are from an interview by Jason Weiss in The Paris Review (Fall 1984, No. 93)

Picture: Julio Cortazar, Casa Tomada

From a Writer's Dream Journal: Mix It Up!

From my morning dreams. Very much in the style of dreams I have when moving towards new book projects.

The Meal That Needs To Be Assembled

In a Mexican restaurant. It is a modest place, where most of the action is at the takeout counter. I want something that is not on the regular menu, and they say that can make it for me. The waiter has little or no English, so I communicate with him in Spanish. I order a margarita con sel y con hielo.
     I don’t understand what he brings. There is a little glass with slices of lime and a small amount of what looks like sweet syrup. And a second glass filled with a light yellowish liquid, and another with water. I sample each glass and realize that the second glass contains neat tequila. He has given me the fixings for a margarita, not the finished drink. I’ll need to mix it according to my own taste. Not such a bad idea, though it’s strange that a Mexican restaurant can’t deliver a finished margarita.
    The food delivery is equally strange. I am given some small plates with different ingredients that are not yet a finished dish. I poke around, wondering what’s going on, looking rather hungrily at other customers who are picking up regular specials (including chicken and fries). I don’t understand that I am supposed to make my own dish until the waiter starts to remove plates of meat and peppers that I have barely touched, while delivered rice and beans and tortillas on separate plates. I bark at him to leave my food on the table!

Feelings: Cheerful, laughing at myself

Reality: It’s certainly possible I could go to a disorganized or bad Mexican restaurant in the future! But it’s the symbolism of the meal and the drink that need to be assembled that strikes me here.
    We get to recognize our personal styles of dreaming, and this dream in very much in the mode of those I often have when starting to move forward with new book projects. The state of the kitchen or the restaurant in my dreams often reflects, rather exactly, the state of my progress and organization in relation to a new book. When the scene is a restaurant, the theme can extend to relations with publishers and the marketing and commercial aspects of a book project.
    I’ve ordered something beyond the regular menu, as well as a drink that is very popular and familiar. For both to be completed and fixed according to my taste, I have some mixing and assembling to do. The good news is that the ingredients are all there! And also that, while I need to speak a different language in this place, I am competent in that language.    

One-liner (also my Action Statement): You have all the ingredients. Mix it up! (And don't let anyone take anything off the table until you're done.)

Fajitas photo by Eric T. Gunther

When Owl gave Jeffery Eugenides the breath of creation

Jeffery Eugenides' novel Middlesex is a triumph of creative empathy. It accomplishes what the best novels do, which is to expand our humanity by transporting us inside the lives and perspectives of others. It also shows us how we can do this for ourselves, by using active imagination to enter the lives of ancestors or the body of a person of a different gender, even a gender not commonly recognized.
     So I was delighted, though not surprised, to read Eugenides' revelation in a recent article that it was a dream, simple but shockingly direct and numinous, that gave him the power to finish Middlesex. He was living in Berlin at the time, struggling to keep food on the table through a modest fellowship, often sleep-deprived because of an infant child, drinking a good deal of German beer in an effort to loosen up.
     He was seized by a dream. His entire dream report reads as follows:

An owl, descended out of nowhere, seized me in its talons and blew into my mouth a single breath tasting of blood. 

The one-sentence report describes a dream that lasted (he says) all of four or five seconds. Yet he sensed that the owl's visitation "originated not from my mind at all but from a source outside of me". The owl was gigantic, "and not particularly realistic". Its plumage reminded him of paintings by Klimt, with lozenges of color running up and down the wings and over the  breast, and "a large helmeted ceremonial head". The owl's eyes were fierce and bright yellow. When the owl dipped its beak to Eugenides' lips, he opened his mouth, unresisting. The owl exhaled one long forceful breath. With a whoosh, his lungs inflated. This inspiration had a taste: "the mineral, meaty flavor of a predatory diet". 
    The writer awakened with the deep knowing that a power had been conveyed to him from a greater source: "the great Owl in the Sky had taken a personal interest in me and my book. The owl had come to give me the power to write."

Graphic: René Magritte, "The Companions of Fear" (1926)

By dream train through Greeneland

I am given an exciting new writing assignment, on a high floor of a vast modern complex. In the office made available to me, I discover a gift. It is a copy of the first edition of a novel by Graham Greene that was republished under a different title that is better-known today. The pages are yellowed and the spine a bit cracked, but this book is precious to me. The card with it informs me that it was the personal property of the ruler of an East European country, "as well known as Lenin in his time", who treasured it.

What do you do with a dream like this? Simple. You walk with it to your favorite used bookstore, which just happens to be a few doors down the street, a mixed blessing since the stock is forever moving up the street into my house (I am not the Kindle type). The shelf elf hadn't missed a beat. On top of the new arrivals in fiction was a handsome recent Penguin edition of Graham Greene's Orient Express. I glanced at the publishing history to verify my hunch. Yes. This is the novel that was originally published in Britain in 1932 as Stamboul Train. The American publisher wanted the title change, and Orient Express has stuck.

When I stepped back through the looking glass from my dream situation, a mirror reversal took place. In the dream, I got the first edition of a novel later published as Orient Express. In the bookshop, I got the latest edition of a novel originally published as Stamboul Train. Naturally, I purchased the book, even though I knew it was highly likely that I already had a copy among my sizeable collection of books by and about Graham Greene.

I stayed up until dawn to finish Orient Express. This was no hardship. The book is beautifully crafted and the smallest scenes are etched in memory. Greene called this novel an "entertainment", but it is very noir, shadowed by tyrants and secret policemen, back-stabbings and betrayals.

The main plot device may seem formulaic. The fates of a mixed bag of characters - crook and chorus girl, Socialist revolutionary and scoop-hungry Lesbian reporter - intertwine as they ride a train together. But Orient Express transcends the formulas because of the author's feel for character, which is deepened by the use of dreams. As the passengers nod off on the the train, they slip into dreams. Early in the story, Myatt, the importer of currants en route to Istanbul, sees the crooked dealings of an associate as a set of floating balloons he proceeds to pop.

Held by the police in a Serbian train station on a terrifying night, the chorus girl Coral Musker drifts off into twin dreams:

She dreamed first that she was a child and everything was very simple and very certain and everything had an explanation and a moral. And then she dreamed that she was very old and was looking back over her life and she knew everything and she knew what was right and what was wrong and why this and that had happened and everything was very simple and had a moral.

Greene adds: "the second dream was not like the first, for she was nearly awake and she ruled the dream to suit herself." He is describing a form of lucid dreaming. The brief passage hints at something further. We start out in life with the simplicity of the child; if we live long enough, and grow enough, we rise above the complexities and confusion of adult life and achieve simplicity again.

Greene's own dreams at the time he wrote Orient Express were full of "disquiet" (as he noted in A Sort of Life); they color the moods of the novel and orient its plot. I was reminded that Graham Greene, a consummately professional writer capable of tapping out his daily quota whatever his excesses the night before, and a profoundly worldly and world-weary man, was also a prolific and dedicated dreamer. He benefited greatly from being encouraged to recount his dreams as an adolescent. He has cracked up at school and run away, a huge embarrassment to his father, the headmaster. He was packed off for London for three months to be sorted out by a shrink with an eclectic approach who treated Greene, then 16, by asking him to tell a dream at 11:00 every morning. Often Greene had dreams. When he did not, he would make something up.

The habit stuck. He kept copious dream journals, right up to his death. They fueled much of his creative work. Some of his novels (The Honorary Consul is one) began with a dream. Sometimes a dream would fill in a gap in a plot. Often he would attribute his own dreams to his characters; frequently he felt he was dreaming their dreams. When he was writing A Burnt-Out Case he dreamed as his character Querry and could insert his dream without change in the novel, “where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross", as he reported in Ways of Escape.

Greene gave a ringing testimonial to the creative role of dreaming in a writing life in his memoir Ways of Escape: "The unconscious collaborates in all our work; it is a nègre we keep in the cellar to aid us. When an obstacle seems insurmountable, I read the day’s work before sleep and leave the nègre to labor in my place. When I wake the obstacle has nearly always been removed: the solution is there and obvious – perhaps it came in a dream which I have forgotten."

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For a full account of dreams in Graham Greene's life as a writer, please see The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.