July 26, 2008

Dream away

For some (most?), writing can be a process of wringing your heart and draining your mind in an attempt to warm the hearts and minds of readers.

You don't analyze a dream—you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes it makes you anxious. A narrative is the same—you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package called fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of the narrative." - Haruki Murakami in a lecture at First Parish Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 18, 2005; as excerpted in a New York Review of Books article.

Incidentally, most dreams lately have made me anxious; very few have been healing. And I do not analyze them - just enjoy them, as I always have. Alternative realities that are alluring, despite, or maybe because of, all their incongruous uncertainities.

Also, sometimes one just gets too used to being in a state of disquietude -- numbed and decapacitated into inaction and yet a penetrating reminder of being alive. (This last thought is not something that is directly related to the idea of dreaming but just a reflection of a current state of being.)

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