Th3 Simple Questions

WHO AM I?

Writers are dreamers who gather imagination and fantasies and bring them down to words. When the reader reads what I have written, you read and imagine or experience my dream, and so you dream along with me. You follow along with my thinking and my path through the fantasies to the imagination.

So, as a writer, I must be aware that the reader and I share an intimate, sacred space. I must be true to the reader. Because you follow my imagination, my interior becomes your interior; my passions, your passions (even if only for a while). I must be very careful about what I write because it is not only for my self-expression but because what I write goes into your soul.

It all begins with the writer’s dream and the reader’s willingness to dream along with him.

When William Shakespeare wrote sonnets to his lover, he was a writer gathering imagination and fantasies and bringing them down to words on paper. But the words expressed an intimacy and knowledge of the lover not known to the ordinary reader. And when his lover read his writing, she dreamt his dream in a more intimate way. She followed along with his thinking and his path through his intimate fantasies to the imagination.

As a writer, he was aware that the reader/lover and he shared an intensely intimate, sacred space. He was very careful about what he wrote because the response was more highly charged and evocative for his lover than it is for us readers hundreds of years later.

WHY AM I HERE?

The reader or dreamer of the writer’s dream has what may be called a Night Self consciousness versus a Day Self consciousness. The Day Self consciousness begins when you wake in the morning and drag your emotions and body out of bed and ends when you go to sleep at night. The Day Self consciousness is sense-bound. When the Day Self lies down to rest the body and the energetic self, your Night Self arises and unfolds. This is a deeper sleeping than the reader’s sleep.

The Day Self believes that all of life is measured by its accomplishments, the stuff of your to-do list, what you post on Facebook and tuck into photo albums (the resumes, degrees, awards, milestones along the concentric circles of your life, including business trips, family carpooling, small-town worries, shopping and Starbucks, culminating in a headstone).

The Day Self exists in space; the Night Self exists in time. Her existence is measured in cycles of time, rhythmical patterns, seasonal revels, festivals, evolution, joy, warm welcomes, canning, gardens, growth, children and all expressions of love. The night reveals a world qualitatively different from the experience of the day.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet XLIII is the dream in which the dreamer meets the lover in the night. This is a dreamer writing the dream in which he describes the Dream Lover.

“When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

For all the day they view things unrespected;

But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,

And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.

Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,

How would thy shadow’s form form happy show

To the clear day with thy much clearer light,

When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?

How would, I say, my eyes be blessed made

By looking on thee in the living day,

When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade

Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!

All days are nights to see till I see thee,

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.”

When, hundreds of years after it was written, you read Shakespeare’s dream of the Dream Lover, a mood of the night remains. A feeling, perhaps. Not the stuff of Day consciousness.

WHAT DO I WANT?

We are all sleepers in the dreams of others. Before you were born, lofty spiritual beings dreamed you into existence. Where are they now? Who is dreaming the dream of you? Who is writing your story? Whose ideals or ideas fill your inner world? Where do you go when you sleep? With whom do you commune? Who is it that dreams that “deep and dreamless sleep” as silent stars go by over the little town of Bethlehem? When, where and why will we awaken, lose our illusions or become disenchanted?