Eudora Said
The First Edition Act
This dream was in three acts. All acts are clear and memorable, but I’m only writing about a few scenes in the second act regarding a book.
I was in a classroom with seven others. It was the last day and we were almost finishing up. I’d been taken by the subject, about making improvements in how I live, as were my classmates. We’d become a close group, but after days of all-day classes, the classroom was messy.
Close to the final hour, we took a break. Two people came in. One was a cleaning person, a female, and the other was a young man. The young man was collecting books to send to a poor town in another country. In very high spirits, I helped the cleaning person, and then I helped the young man. They left. After a few more minutes, class was ready to resume.
When I went back to my seat, I discovered my copy of the book gone. I realized it must have gone with the young man and rushed out of the classroom to find him and retrieve my book.
The classroom was in a huge building and crowded with people. I hurried along, looking for the fellow and asking others if they’d seen him and where he’d gone. After some of this, a friend, Brent, told me that he’d seen the man leave by a side door several minutes before. I hurried there where another person said yes, the guy had been there, and he’d just driven off in his truck.
Upset, I wandered back toward my classroom, but I was obsessed. I wanted to keep the book for future use. Knowing that others had taken the course, I walked around to see if I could find another copy of it.
Dark blue, soft bound, with its title in yellow letters, I did find other copies of it. Some belonged to friends, and they were keeping the book. Nobody had an extra. I saw it alone on people’s desk a few times and thought about stealing those books, but that’s not something that I would do.
Continuing on my quest to find a copy, I entered a large work office. Everyone there was busy, and looked up when I entered. Embarrassed, I tried to slip through the classroom by staying close to the perimeter and get out without drawing too much attention or being an interruption. But doing that required me to pass the woman who was in charge. Calling me by name, she asked what I was doing.
I was impressed and pleased that she knew me by my name, as she was someone important in the company, so I told her had happened. Sympathizing, she offered me her copy of the book, and told me to keep it.
Her worn copy was black and smaller. As I declined taking it, I opened it and realized it was a signed first-edition. “I can’t take this, it’s a signed first edition.”
The woman waved me off. “Take it, it’s yours.”
After so more of similar back and forth, I left with the book. Outside the office, I stood in the hall to consider the prize that’d been given to me.
End of act.
Each Day
Each day, I realize that I don’t know much. I can’t even say that I know much about a particular subject. I tend to know a very little bit about very few things.
Each day, I re-discover things that I’d learned and forgotten. I discover things that I learned when we thought we knew better, but have to learn again because more has been learned. Really, I’m just learning to keep up.
Each day, I learn how much things change between each day and person. I’ve learned that we’re very inconsistent about what we think we know. We like to have what we think we learned validated to verify that we learned what we think we learned.
Each day, I realize how much there is to learn, not just about complicated or esoteric subjects or unfolding scandals, but about myself and the small area of existence that is my world.
Each day, I realize how much I enjoy learning. Sometimes — hell, many times — it wears me out. But with each day, I realize how fragile learning and knowledge really are, and how knowledge can be tortured and twisted.
Each day, I set out, one more time, with a cup of coffee and try to learn just a little bit more.
And some days, I remember it.
A Dream in Four Parts
Today’s dream was clear and detailed. This could be attributed to how it was processed.
- I dreamed it.
- I awoke and thought about it.
- I fell asleep again, and dreamed about thinking about it.
- I dreamed about writing about it.
That sort of repetition reinforces matters, you know?
The dream’s four parts were interesting. It interested me, at least, because I was the star.
- The dream’s first part featured two officers with whom I was assigned at different locations.
- In the second part, I was diagramming a layout to provide a place for people to survive.
- With the third part, I was teaching another how to use a computer to document the diagram I’d created.
- The fourth part of the dream found me exploring deeper levels.
The two officers were Major Andrews and Captain Knot (fake names). I was assigned with one in Japan, and the other in Europe. One was a C141 pilot and the other flew Hercs.
Knot is a foot shorter than Andrews. But in this dream, Knot had instructions. Andrews was supposed to receive them. But Knot, the short one, teased Andrews the tall, holding the instructions up and behind him, preventing Andrews from reaching it, vexing the much taller Andrews.
In my analysis during my dream, this made me laugh. Part of me was keeping another part of me from having something. Here’s the twist. Andrews was an authority figure, the officer-in-charge, and I worked for him. Knot was a buddy.
Yes, lots to ponder there, no?
The diagram involved an enormous bunker. We were pre-positioned personnel, preparing the facilities as a sanctuary for the others who were to come. I was one of many, but an indeterminate number. I was given a space and the mission brief (the instructions that Knot kept from Andrews). Enthusiastically, I plotted how my space was to be used to help others. The results pleased me. I shared them with others, and they began copying my design.
The official coordinator arrived. Her task was to document the diagrams on a computer for them so higher authorities could approve them. But she was unfamiliar with her computer. I knew it, however, so I sat down and explained to her how to use it. The computer depended on touch screen technology and soft buttons. She didn’t know these terms, and had never used equipment like that. I walked her through their use. She picked it up quickly.
Then, I was off, exploring with Knot. The facilities, made of white cement, had multiple levels and doors. I began exploring with Knot reluctantly following. Going deeper, I discovered more subterranean levels. They connected to other places, like malls, airports, and government buildings. Discerning a pattern to the levels, doors, and buildings, I gained rapid familiarity with how to get around. Several places were marked with red doors and warnings not to loiter in the area and to stay away from those doors. That didn’t deter me but Knot was worried, and urged that we leave. I didn’t leave until one red door opened and a large man in a black uniform came out to speak with us.
At that point, I returned to the original level with Knot behind me.
Although I thought about it, and dreamed I wrote about it, I think I’ll need more time to fully process it. The aspect about deeper levels to explore intrigued me. I associated that with my self.
Overall, the dream was a powerful and uplifting experience. In a striking juxtaposition, it matches my feeling the day after winter solstice that a weight had been lifted from me. I’d had a feeling for a while that I was on the precipice of a change. After solstice and this dream, I feel that I’m moving on to something else.
That has me excited and hopeful.
The Future Dream
I’ve endured a surfeit of dreams this past week. Many stayed with me. I can’t say they all did. I don’t know if that’s true.
One particularly striking dream dominated. The dream setting was simple. Basically, um, me. Not the whole me, either, but head, neck, a bit of torso, and shoulders, the traditional bust sculptor. I knew I was sitting, and dressed in a light blue Oxford shirt, like the sort I favor. I don’t know where I was. The background was a favoring blue sky rich with sunshine over a calm ocean. Green hills sloped down to the ocean. Some of this strikes me as Mediterranean in retrospect.
Others were there, never seen, but sometimes heard, males and females. They could have been one of each, or more. I never saw them. They were commentators, commenting on me, and my activities. On my part, I was looking into the future. In the first stages of this, it troubled me, because I wasn’t correctly seeing the future. The commentators, in their dry, pithy way, said, “Okay, that’s fine, you’re just starting. Take your time. Try again.” Sometimes they spoke of me in the third person, “He’s fine, let him try again.”
Arms crossed against that background, all I did was sat, look, and listen. A soft breeze tousled my hair as the future was fed to me. As that happened, I assimilated it and explained what I saw. Part of this, my dream-self knew, was to make it my own, but I was also explaining to gain feedback and improve my comprehension.
It went thus for a while, with the commentators speaking more often as my visions clarified and my confidence waxed. Like teachers, they would sometimes say, “That’s right.” A female more often told me that. The dream ended with me happy, with a male commentator saying, “Okay, he’s got it. He knows how to see the future.”
Naturally, awakening, the dream pleased me. But I was also dissatisfied, because I couldn’t remember any of the future I was purported to see. That fits better with my personal philosophy; I think the future is wholly malleable. There’s probably more than one future in my future. I may skate between them, but chances are, I’ll mostly travel through one.
Even if I’m wrong, it was such a pleasant, powerful, and affirming dream.
The H.S. Football Dream
I dreamed I was a teenager. It was bright and sunny outside, and I was inside a well-lit building. I learned that my high school football team was short of players. Coach Thomas came to me and asked if I’d play. I’d quit the team the year before, after an accident.
Pleased, I quickly agreed. He gave me some instructions. A game was starting soon. I needed to get there fast. “Don’t let me down,” he said, in a joking but serious style.
I raced to prepare. People were giving me things. It took longer than expected to get ready. A player – a real-life buddy from high school – came in. “Coach Thomas sent me in to see what’s going on. You need to get out there.”
I looked out a window. From there, I could see and hear things happening. Part of that was Coach Thomas talking to the ref, who was warning Thomas, “You need to field a team.” Coach Thomas was irritated and impatient as he asked for more time, insisting, “He’s coming, he’s coming. I need him.”
“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying,” I told the player. He left.
I don’t know what I needed to get. It seemed like that’s an extension of confusion I felt in the dream. Finally, I was out there, with the team, and in the line-up, nervous and uncertain. I had a piece of paper with instructions in my hand. The ref made me give that up. A player beside me, Daryl, told me he’d help me know what to do. A whistle blew as I jumped offsides. I wasn’t pleased with how it was going. I lined up again in a different position. The game commenced without any significant highlights, except players would suggest things to me. I’d do those things, and my confidence grew.
That’s how the dream entailed. I took three lessons from it.
- Don’t sweat the mistakes. You’re going to make them but you can overcome them.
- You have more to learn.
- Others will help.
A very positive dream to remember.
Distinct Memories
I have distinct memories of three dreams last night. I’ll not torture the net with many details.
I do want to ask Hugh Laurie why he came into my dream.
There were five of us present. We were all in pale white hooded robes, doing some fantastic wizard stuff, when I made some cutting observation that it was all being staged. It was fake. Upon those statements, the action stopped. The lights went up and the robes fell away, revealing us as common, average humans in pants, shirts and shoes. And yes, we were on a sound stage. And yes, one of the other players was Hugh Laurie. He was in charge. Sneering at me after we were exposed, he said, “Thanks for ruining the magic.”
Revelations were the general themes of the three dreams. In one of the other dreams, I was being taught how others reacted to hypothetical situations and what they did to cheat and achieve better results. This was being done in a high school. Classes were going on but I was part of a select adult class being taught this particular subject. We were using the students’ results as study materials.
The students had written their homework and test answers on strange materials. One was written on a metal locker with a black marker. I had to bend down to read it. I sharply remember another was written on a box of Wheaties. (I was amused by that detail, as Wheaties was my go-to breakfast cereal when I was young.) They had neat writing. It was in blue ink, with a pen, cursive, down the side panel, around the ingredients and nutritional information.
They were writing about what they would do if they were given a speeding ticket. This person had written on the Wheaties, ‘I would eat the ticket!’ That made me laugh. Others and I discussed our findings, marveling and joking about how creative these young people were. I was beginning to think in new ways, I realized. Our instructor then appeared ‘off dream’. They announced that we were ready to begin our next stage of training using the knowledge acquired from this exercise when I awoke.
There is so much more but the prospect of remembering all those details exhausts me. Then I would probably fall asleep and dream more. It’s like my own version of Catch-22.
The Writing Like Crazy Process
The writing like crazy is structured and unstructured, crazy and sane. Really, it just is. Such tautalogy is extremely helpful, isn’t it?
But it is what it is (there’s that help again). Originally structured to shift me from the real world’s insanity to the pleasurable world of writing and editing fiction, the process was all about release. Let me go, job, wife, cats, house, bills, stress, frustration, whatever. Take me away, writing.
The early days began as an after work period. Go somewhere in the house and write. That didn’t work too well, and I blame me. I couldn’t stop myself from falling into normal home routines and thoughts. I initiated a program to go somewhere else and write. Armed with a Z4 pen (my preference) and black and white marble composition notebooks (I was always alert for notebook sales), I usually ended up in a coffee shop, where I would have coffee. Coffee shops were tested like bath water until the ones that worked just right emerged. I was traveling for business often in those years, so I would often write in airplanes and airports.
But my hours and routine were iffy. When home, I often ended up writing only on weekends (at Printers Inc), by getting up early. That wasn’t enough, so the program was expanded to an extended lunch hour at work. Testing the process, I discovered that walking improved my writing mood, so I parked about a mile from the coffee shop and walked. In 1999-2000, I could be spotted in San Mateo, California, walking to a Starbucks. As my company moved its office to Shoreline in Mountain View, I drove to downtown Mountain View and used that Starbucks. Meanwhile, I lived in Half Moon Bay and walked each Saturday and Sunday morning to La Di Da. After moving to Ashland, Oregon, in 2005, I began walking the town to coffee shops. The marble composition books were replaced by laptops.
In those days, I set a word count target, and I tracked it meticulously. There was no pay it forward, no credits and debits. 1,000 words needed to be reached each day, every day. Even if I did 2,000 one day, 1,000 was required the next day. I never let myself off that hook.
With each refinement, I learned more about myself and my writing process. I discovered I was an organic writer, writing with scant mapping or outlining. I found that writing like crazy was critical. Writing like crazy meant that I shoved aside thoughts of grammar, facts, punctuation, and sometimes even point of view and character, and just rode a wave of words rushing into my mind. Then I’d go back and fix it all. When I stalled, I learned to create snapshots to find direction. Snapshots were just exploratory summaries to help me find understanding of the character(s), setting(s), plot, concept, story line, whatever. They were generally not meant for reader consumption, except for my reading.
Learning and evolving fortunately continued. I learned to ask, why, why, why did this character do this or that, or this or that happened, along with the corollary matters of when, what and how. I saw how I told and then showed the same thing, how I tended toward passive writing, how I enjoyed run on sentences and became more mindful of them – when editing – but how, becoming aware of them, fixing them were folded into my writing like crazy process. I learned what I really enjoyed reading by critiquing others, good and bad, for my own enjoyment, and then shaping my voice to be what I most enjoyed in those books, and I threw the reading doors open to all genres and authors.
I’ve always ‘written in my head’, phantom writing, where I see or hear a scene or the developing story. I found how to harvest the essence of those moments and pick them up and put them into the story. I taught myself to be unafraid to revise and edit as I wrote, discovering that fiction writing was much more like creating a painting then it was like writing an essay. And I encouraged myself to have fun.
I no longer have a daily word count. They’re not needed and I often find myself writing several thousand words. The shift to writing mind is much easier now. I can pick up the story line and where I was quickly in my mind and typically pick up where I was with just a few moments of thought.
I’ve written a number of novels, but haven’t published but two. They’re both recent after wearying myself with the agent/publisher route. Each agent had different requirements, and that tedious process drained my joy and optimism, as well as savaging my writing time. So, fuck it, I’ve gone the ebook self-publishing route. I don’t have great expectations, but I won’t be a fraud and claim it doesn’t matter; it does. But, just as with the writing process, and most of everything else I’ve done in life, I’ll keep trying, keep working on it, and I’m confident, I’ll continue progressing.
Now…time to write like crazy, one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 