As some of you know, I’m recovering from a broken right
wrist. I just got out of the cast and into a brace plus intensive physical
therapy, which has caused a great deal of pain, and in order to sleep at night,
I’m taking heavy-duty pain medicine as I was during the early weeks after the
initial breaking of two bones.
This means weird dreams. That phrase seems redundant. Dreams
are, by nature, non-rational, of course. But these drugged dreams are something
else. Much more vivid and bizarre. The dead walk and talk again in my dreams
right now. My children, the youngest of whom is about to turn thirty, are babes
in arms and toddlers again in these dreams, even as I’m still a child myself, a
sibling to my own kids. Every morning I wake in wonder at the strange,
technicolor movies I’ve just experienced.
Each morning I sit with my cup of tea and record another outlandish
dream—a house suddenly filled with feral cats and I can’t figure out how
they’re getting in or how to keep them out, a strange conference at an unknown
university where I’m responsible for one of the programs when hundreds of
ninjas attack, a ballroom dancing scene where I’m Ginger Rogers in chiffon and
stilettos and only my unknown partner’s hand keeps me from floating off to join
all the other people living on big multicolored clouds.
I’m a writer, so you’d think some of these dreams would
spark stories or books. I have had the germs of stories and books come to me in
my dreams before, but not in medicated dreams like these. I know from sad
experience that none of these will offer me anything more than a moment’s
entertainment and wonder. I suppose that, if I wrote literary short fiction in
the surreal school of writing, I might find them useful, but for someone who writes
mystery novels and thrillers that must make sense to the average reader, these
dreams are a waste of my unconscious’s creative skills.
What they do for me as a writer, however, is remind me that
I have at my disposal an incredibly creative partner in that very unconscious.
I simply have to find ways to guide its creativity and to ground it in the
details of reality. That inventive part of my mind works constantly coming up
with all kinds of stories, good, bad, bizarre, and humdrum. It’s up to me to
harness and channel all that imaginative energy. Still, it would be nice if it
could just toss up a nice, usable, Academy-Award-worthy story now and then.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my nightly excursion
into the world of flying cars, talking dogs, and Nazi storm troopers chasing me
at a writers conference, plus other exciting adventures.
