Sunday, April 04, 2010
Not my dream!
My dreams fall into two categories:
(1) The default mammalian dream. Bits and pieces of current experience or worries, transposed to a different time and place, spliced together at random. The mental equivalent of a daily dump.
(2) Story dreams, with real plot and deep original characters. These were extremely rare until 10 years ago, now fairly common. (I wish I could capture this level of imagination in waking hours!)
Last night's dream was in story form, but it was entirely outside my standard genres, which always have a sci-fi or spy flavor. In this story, I was a magazine reporter doing a feature on a modern farmer; accompanying him as he checked his cattle and wheat, listening as he talked via cell phone to his wife and kids ... and his mistress. At this point I had a moral conundrum: do I spike the whole story, tell it complete with the mistress, or try to persuade him that his life would be just as good (and a lot simpler) without the mistress?
This was not my dream! It's all normal and modern and TV-like. Journalism, farming, cell phones, moral conundrums?? I don't know anything about any of these subjects!
This dream was obviously addressed to the mind of Rod Dreher, and was mistakenly shipped to my head. ¶ 5:43 AM
(1) The default mammalian dream. Bits and pieces of current experience or worries, transposed to a different time and place, spliced together at random. The mental equivalent of a daily dump.
(2) Story dreams, with real plot and deep original characters. These were extremely rare until 10 years ago, now fairly common. (I wish I could capture this level of imagination in waking hours!)
Last night's dream was in story form, but it was entirely outside my standard genres, which always have a sci-fi or spy flavor. In this story, I was a magazine reporter doing a feature on a modern farmer; accompanying him as he checked his cattle and wheat, listening as he talked via cell phone to his wife and kids ... and his mistress. At this point I had a moral conundrum: do I spike the whole story, tell it complete with the mistress, or try to persuade him that his life would be just as good (and a lot simpler) without the mistress?
This was not my dream! It's all normal and modern and TV-like. Journalism, farming, cell phones, moral conundrums?? I don't know anything about any of these subjects!
This dream was obviously addressed to the mind of Rod Dreher, and was mistakenly shipped to my head. ¶ 5:43 AM
