I suppose that anxiety, almost desperation, that I've felt in years past as similar milestones approached was to ensure I didn't just let the moment slip, to do what Henry David Thoreau wrote about (made famous in Dead Poets Society):
"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. To put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."
The bright side about living for the Now is never having to worry not living. The next five days don't necessarily have to be the last five days of 29. They can just be the next five days. That being said, I have a deadline to meet, and this is my warm-up for today's work.
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Dreams have been preoccupying my idle time lately. I'm not only talking metaphorically, but of actual dreaming, REM sleep, id, ego, and superego type of dreaming. Lucid dreaming, and so on.
Dream incubation is a process whereby you try to trigger specific dreams in response to a specific question or problem. We all do it without meaning to whenever we're facing a deep crisis in waking life. How often has the solution, or at least an important puzzle piece on the way to the solution, presented itself while asleep? It hasn't worked completely, but it has enhanced the potency of dreaming, such that I'm remembering more details now. The subconscious is like any muscle in your body: give it attention after a period of neglect, and it will grow stronger. While I'm not directly dreaming about the biggest challenge in my waking life - finishing up my novel in less than a week - it's helping me laterally: I'm finding writing easier now, more of a flow. I did 3,000 words yesterday alone, and it didn't feel like work.
But I digress. Dreams exist beyond practical, waking life applications. As utilitarian as we are, sometimes we'd be better off just enjoying the experiences for what they are, not what uses we can put them towards.
To say that I liked the film Inception is an understatement. It's the type of story I wish I'd written. Damon Lindelhof feels the same way, having tweeted much the same when it first hit theatres. I'll tell you, if Mr. Lindelhof, the guy who thought up LOST, one of my all time favourite TV shows, feels that way, you can imagine my sense of writer's envy at this concept.
Late author Michael Talbot wrote about "a participatory reality", that life may in fact be holographic in nature. A true sheet of holographic film - not necessarily the kind you see on credit cards or cheap store bought products, but the ones in art displays that require lasers to illuminate them - has the whole image embedded into each part of the film. Cut the film in several pieces, and each piece reflects the entire image, rather than a piece of it. This model of existence as a "holographic universe", as Talbot put it in the book of the same name, means that every part of reality necessarily contains all the other parts. This means that the traditional, common sensical experience of the 9 to 5 life for most of us is connected to the dreamworlds that we explore before the alarm clock goes off, and we "wake up".
One of Inception's subplots involves a character who loses the distinction between the dream world and the real world. Sadly, it leads to her death in real life, which of course, when you take a step back, is not real life at all, but a film creation. We lose ourselves in movie theatres, and for that time before the suspension of disbelief kicks*, the film world becomes reality. To paraphrase Leonardo di Caprio's character Dom in Inception, it's only when we've left the theatre that we've noticed something weird: namely, that it wasn't real. But for the time you were engrossed in it, it was real, and that makes me wonder: what makes the movie reality less real than real life?
It's a classic Matrix style question, repeated so often over the past twenty years of speculative fiction and TV talk show spirituality that it's bordering on cliché. Are the things that we create real?
The mediocre, analytical mind says, "Oh, of course not. It's just a story. Quit your daydreaming, melonhead!" Yes, we get that. In our day-to-day reality, where we just accept what we're given and do our best to work with it, where we become uncomfortable with concepts that shake our view of the world, that's the obvious answer. In waking life, yes, they're just inkblots on a piece of paper or chemical reactions on celluloid.
Then again, when we've lost ourselves in someone else's dream world, whether it's captured on film or on paper, how can we deny the reality of our experience? Is it truly vicarious living in those moments, or does it become vicarious only after the experience is over? Now being all we have, that tells me that what I'm doing, what all creative people are doing, is creating a real world, a true story. There may be no such thing as "fiction".
Because if even one human being can lose himself or herself in another's narrative, then the experience is real, meaning there is a world on the page and on film that is just as real as the days spent filling out TPS reports, serving people coffee, running corporations, or even wandering the streets, unemployed and destitute. Media is simply our point of access.
This is the essence of my novel. I set a personal deadline to finish it by my 30th birthday. I have five days, yes, but I also have right now. And now is all we ever have that's real.
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(* yes, that was an Inception term)
(* yes, that was an Inception term)
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