Walter Said
A Manuscripts & Politics Dream
It began with my little sister presenting me with a manuscript. Handing over a large stack of paper, she explained that she’d written a novel and wanted me to read it and give my opinion. I agreed, but asked her to reciprocate: read my novel and give my opinion.
Gina’s manuscripts turned out to be a humorous mystery. I thought it had a lot of merit. That’s the feedback I gave her. Did she have feedback for me? No, she hadn’t read my ms. She started but then forgot.
Her answer frustrated me. I’d lived up to my end, etc. I was called away before we could finish the conversation. Gina and I agreed to meet later.
Going on somewhere else via dreamport, I was now in a hilly city. It had been rainy. I was standing on the corner by a street. A man in a dark suit and raincoat (who looked a lot like James Noble (the actor)) approached me. We knew one another and shook hands and talked. Within a few minutes, he was telling me that they’d just come out with word about who the new POTUS was going to be. He gave me a name. It as going to be announced soon.
The name surprised me. I knew the man’s name and so on, but didn’t know him. I expressed some concerns about him.
We started walking down the hill. He was concerned about the choice, too, and was wondering where the man was. He didn’t know if the man had heard yet. As we walked down the hill, the other man mentioned the name again, and then said, “Do you know who he is?”
I began talking about that when the other said, “No, he’s my father.”
That completely surprised me. We went through a conversation about their last names, which was something like LaFontaine. I said, “Pierre?” The other said with a smile, “No, that’s the NRA guy.”
As I was mulling that information, others arrived, and the conversation went on again about the new president. Then the new president drove up in a little old white imported economy car. While it ran without any problems, the car looked like it was forty years old, something small, with petite chrome bumpers, like a Datsun 510 (see the picture?) from the early seventies. (I’ve never owned or drove a 510, btw.)
The others all went off. I trudged back up the hill and, via dreamport, returned to my sister and the manuscripts. She’d read my manuscript and had some suggestions. As we began talking about that, a second younger sister, Sharon, arrived to give me her manuscript. I was surprised. We began talking, and as we did, I said, “I need to add more humor to my novel,” and was excited by immediate ideas that came to me about how to do that.
Then I awoke.
Then Again
I didn’t know what I was going to write today. I knew I had a scene in progress. In theory, there was another scene ahead. With it in mind, I was puzzling around what do I write today to get there, and considered just jumping ahead to write that scene.
That didn’t feel right to my instincts, though, so I sat down, and started typing from where the last sentence left off. Once again, I went off in an unanticipated, unexpected direction. When, twenty pages later, I finished the scene and stopped, I was pleased and touched by what had happened. It was so in character with the series and novel in progress. I hadn’t planned it; the characters and muse seemed in control. Intellectually, I know, it must be me, right? I’m the one with the brain behind the skull and fingers on the keyboard, but the writing had that dreamlike flow, as if I was a pipe and it was just being pumped through me.
It’s unnerving, honestly, because I wonder if I’m not a little crazy. (Okay, I concede that I’m a little crazy; I suppose what’s in question is how crazy I might be.) I like what I wrote, and I worry that others won’t like it. Then again, I don’t care. Some readers won’t; some readers will. The words are out there as part of the record, subject to the editing and revising processes just like everything else.
Now — amazing, I’ve been here for over two and half hours. My rear end is in pain from sitting. I still have coffee in that twelve ounce mug. An oily film covers the coffee’s cold surface.
Time to drink up, mask up, and call it done for another day of writing like crazy.
Another Mary Said
I remember telling other neighborhood children stories that I made up, often citing them as my dreams. Sometimes they started as a dream, but I often just began telling an incident. I remember that once a dozen children a year or two younger stood in my cousin’s garage, listening to me tell them a story that I was making up as I stood there.
Sunday’s Theme Music
More of the Kinks today, courtesy of nothing but the random firing of neurons that develop my neural stream.
In retrospect, I think I can track a rough, macro line of the neurons firing from a dream about kinetic energy to brainstorming about kinetic time (and imaginary- and anti-time), Chi-particles (and there most certainly must be anti-Chi-particles) and the arrows of time, to writing like crazy, to sitting back and thinking about the series in progress (Incomplete States) (and novel in progress (Good-bye, Hello)) to imagining people’s reaction upon reading the series that I must be ignorant and crazy. From there, I jump to fantasy, (because, I imagine them saying, “He’s living in a fantasy world, writing that stuff,”) and, voilà, I hear the Kinks’ recording of “A Rock ‘n Roll Fantasy”.
From the Misfits album of 1978, here’s “A Rock ‘n Roll Fantasy”
Albert Said
I’m certain this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it applies to me. That’s why long, solitary walks feel right to me.
The Kinetic Dream
I dreamed I heard crashing waves and knew it was the sea, and then entered a place. I wasn’t alone but was with friends (yet there was no one I recognized from my life).
We walked grassy paths which sometimes had stone pavers. The paths were narrow. It was a haphazard arrangement. It seemed like the lanes wove around multiple small cottages.
A sense of age permeated the settlement. Made of rough stone, the picturesque cottages had small, red or green doors, low roofs and soft, amber-toned walls. Yellow light, like candle or fireplace light, was shining through their four-pane windows. Many windows had flower boxes with red or white pansies growing in them. Sometimes I saw people, mostly children, in the cottages.
As I walked about the place, I had a sense that they’d been separate cottages which had then had a roof built over them to enclose them. I made that comment, which incensed an older man (tall and white, balding, with a dark, disheveled mustache and goatee), who was apparently the owner. I didn’t know why he was upset; it wasn’t anything derogatory, but he seemed to take it that way. I tried to explain what I meant and why, but he brushed me off.
Meanwhile, a younger white woman with short, light-brown hair, told me to remember to say things from time to time. I gathered from her I was there to give a speech. I was to talk about energy. She was a teacher; she wanted to ensure that I explained kinetic energy correctly.
She and I separated. She was with one group and I was in another. My group were adults. They were all friends. Children made up the teacher’s group. She was talking to the children about kinetic energy and explaining examples, showing how kinetic energy held things up. I started thinking, that’s not what kinetic energy is. She said that kinetic energy was what made walls and chairs stand up. Hearing her, I’d look at her, and she would make fists and cross her arms and say, “Kinetic energy.”
Even though I nodded at her in agreement, I was confused because that’s not what I thought kinetic energy was. I tried remembering other forms of energy so that I could talk to her. We came across a large window. In it were two chairs and a table. I looked from it to her. “Kinetic energy,” she said, smiling and nodding, her fists clenched and her arms crossed.
I awoke.
After writing this and thinking about it, I see how it fits into the series I’m writing, Incomplete States, but more thought is needed.
Michael Seidel, writer 