In Dreams

I often wake myself up in the middle of a dream because I am trying to control it too much and it feels like I am reading a book. A stranger in my dream is doing some sort of activity and I am writing her every move and beautiful prose of her thoughts. Anyone who is lauded for their writing says their trick is too keep a notebook by their bed and write down their good ideas if they have one in the middle of the night. I feel this takes too much energy. I’m trying to sleep, dammit, and if I’m going to get up to turn on the light, I may as well just go type it and give up any hope of sleeping. By the time this happens, that prose has disappeared and only incomplete, incoherent sentences remain.

When I am watching a movie about a writer, fictional or not, they are often alcoholic, suicidal, crazy or a combination of the three. I wonder if to be a famous, interesting writer I have to be the same and if I already am, then why have I not reached my star in the sky yet. Then I remember after my kind of psychosis follows apathy and laziness, the ability to write a complete sentence but no good ideas to write about.

On one particular night of self, I found myself watching what was probably my one hundred thousandth syndicated episode of the longest running television series in history. Tom Wolfe was making an animated cameo of himself, which was strange because earlier that day I had been telling my co-worker she’d enjoy his writing. When ever I watch this episode #384, I can’t help but to feel jealous of the downtrodden barkeeper’s poem, “Howling at a Concrete Moon.” I think it is better than anything I’ve ever written and his was meant to be funny.

There was I time I couldn’t sleep for weeks and in the pitiful minutes I lapsed in and out of consciousness, I would find myself with the overwhelming desire to check the floor by the door for a “dear Jane” letter to myself. If I were to write it what would it say? “I’m sorry but…” the letter would trail off because I would already know what I was thinking, feeling about this mess I’m in. The thing is, though, I don’t want to write a dear jane letter to myself. I want someone else to write it to me so I have an excuse to feel abandoned, to know the reason is it’s him, not me, who doesn’t have the desire to make this work, that my tortured writer’s soul has come between us.