Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Very late today, because I worked Monday and Tuesday, which is most unusual.

I am a dreamer, I dream vividly. This week, before both of the aforementioned workdays, I played in multiple dreamscapes, some more obviously linked than others. The dreams I awoke from on Monday were so vivid I daydreamed about them afterwards in my morning shower, and whoosh! There it was, a short story, novella, or novel, right there, a mirror into other worlds polished bright by my imagination.

It was awesome. I had to write it down. I was late to work. I’m still thinking about it, because it is such a total departure from my normal sandbox of stories, but I am completely comfortable with it, and what it could be.

My wife had decided somewhat randomly to read Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks this past Saturday, finished it Sunday, and I think seeing it set my subconscious a swirl, for my dreams started in a version of Scotland and ended in a far future. I can see his style of SF all over it: not the Culture novels, more Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background, with a bit of wry Zelazny AI monologuing and symbiotic cloning thrown in for good measure. With love and loss at its heart. Hand squeezing hand in a block of ice. I fucking love it.

I cannot recommend the SF books of Iain M. Banks highly enough. Brilliant writer. I loved his literary fiction too, but since his death I’ve stored the books I haven’t yet touched for reading later, so he remains unfinished for me, a pleasure promised.  

Anyway, the dreams were two long stretches that I realized were linked, and then imagined what they might have meant in a particular universe, and where they might lead. I might try it as an extended short story first, and then a triptych of before, during and after, and see then if it has the legs to become a full novel. It might, but I haven’t enjoyed the delight of new ideas quite this much in a long time.

Then last night, before this morning I dreamed again, and in two sections also. Here were intricate schemes clothed in much more familiar garb, I don’t dream in fantasy often, to be honest, and this felt more like a historical fiction, medieval, with the intensity of short lives lived in eternal uncertainty, grasping for glory known to be fleeting.

I’ve been there before. Over time, even in the dream, I realized I was re-clothing contemporary conflicts in old imagery, and once I realized that I stepped back from the story as I dreamed it and became less engaged. The second section became muddy, a looping recursion of two or three scenes, contemporary if you lived in the 80s, haha!

I was not moved to write that one down. I was only one minute late to work. My computer took forever to boot up. My story and I’m sticking to it.

The second night’s dreaming has a core I do want to write about and address, but was almost too on the nose with it. But the first half characters were so vivid, and so suited to the message it made me think of my shelved-but-not-abandoned project The Red Palace and how that dream could be used to reinforce that story’s underpinnings and events. Yes. That would be a good use of it, I see now, as I type this. Sweet.

This, for me, is an essential part of being creative. Letting something brilliant come to you, by whatever route – this time it was dreams – and then shaping it into a thing of promise. In many ways the most intense burst of creativity is already done. The rest of crafting a story is the molding of this first supply of miraculous clay into something less incoherent, more comprehensible, whilst still trying to keep the starry sheen of magical other alive, so others might feel just a little of what I felt as I lay dreaming.