Roads to Joy

Never mind the actual dream events, I thought to myself earlier this morning, it’s the conflation of strange but contemporary circumstances that has sparked a graceful note from my subconscious. That note is like an admonition from my listening, watchful alter ego: yes, you do have an imagination, somewhere within.

I have no real wish to try to interpret the meaning of this remembered dream, one of the few I’ve ever been able to recall. What I’m delighted with is the imaginative process the dreamstate has revealed. It’s a wonder, and oddly comforting.

Much of my writing time is spent wrestling with my inner editor who likes to sit on my shoulder and insist on proper grammar and punctuation. Or perfect scansion in the case of poetry, or at least rhythmicity that sings. I cannot, I cannot, delve into so-called ‘automatic writing‘ which is called for in this month’s VisualVerse.org stimulus. The editor is always with me, always, and I cannot call it off. Except, perhaps, when it’s asleep.

There it cannot stultify my imagination with grammatical rules, with appropriate placement of apostrophes and commas. There it rests, and apparently then my subconscious is freed, my imagination is unbound, and new and wondrous associations may be made.

It may be surreal, impossibilist, counter-factual. None of that matters. What does matter is the freedom to explore, and more than that, the recall of that experience upon awaking. These things matter to a tortured artistic sensibility, even if that sense has long been subsumed in an intellectual order.

I shall have to endeavour to kind of cross my eyes, gaze into the unfocused mid-range, and let my imagination loose. That’s a kind of shivery joy, I sense, but the anticipation is real.

Dream on, lad.