Dreams and drinking.
Easing out of sleep and back into a writing routine.
There are ten to fifteen minutes every day where I lose most of my creativity. You'd expect it to be when conversations about the weather are at their most predictable. Or maybe when faced with the few slight alterations of paths while walking to work. But those are branches and choices, small interactions where my consciousness slips into a well-worn groove that requires little to no access to the parts of my brain that, I think, might always be busy making things in the background.
Instead it is in the ten to fifteen minutes where I go from waking to sitting here with my fingers on the keyboard.
I don't think, but am not entirely sure, that my dreaming is an act of creativity. I do know that there are mornings, like this one for instance, where the cats have not been as forceful in their daily campaign to roust me from bed to feed them. This can sometimes start ninety minutes or more before the agreed-upon 5am deadline is crossed. But some mornings, like this one, they either are slower to wake themselves or my dreaming is so deep that their pounces up onto my (lately sore from tendonitis) left shoulder and progressively less subtle pawing of my nose and lips isn't sufficient to wake me.
The dreams themselves are not particularly vivid. Much like the slight choices between the ways to and from work, the elements often repeat and reorder themselves night after night. At their best, though, they find a kind of flow that mirrors a waking state of mind perfect for slipping between hard reality and the more fanciful patterns and logic of poetry.
The dreams, lately, are filled with family members, living and deceased, usually gathered in a kind of liminal, post-celebratory space. Their relative ages do not line up properly, but there is a kind of comfort in having them all in one place. There is a sense that we are all preparing for some departure, a returning to wherever the dream has us calling home. Within the dream my part is usually peripheral to the action, strangely. I am less concerned with participating in the group activity, and more with exploring the landscape surrounding it. I wander.
I wander sometimes looking for a particular place. These dream spaces often come with a kind of unstable but nearly predictable geography. There are cities that I have visited, but in the dream I usually find myself on the outskirts or in the suburbs bordering the recognizable landmarks at the centre, trying to find the first clear indicators of where to turn towards a destination. And there are villages and the spaces in between them that fold together like road maps, changing distances unexpected, or throwing up some sudden and impossible bit of architecture or landscape; archways made of stone that are both natural but worked by ancient hands; palaces sitting amidst the modest and real seaside cottages of some coastal blip; rural paths that gradually fill in with more and more closely spaced buildings, crowding the roadsides until they go from outside to inside, from structures I was passing to food courts or markets I find myself walking through, looking... looking.
When the cats' hunger finally becomes too strong to allow this to continue I am pulled into the half light of morning, but mostly still in that kind of fluid state of mind where change is perpetual and invention is simple. But it is in the ten to fifteen minutes, filled with predictable decisions and tasks... avoiding trampling the cats while I find out if there are wet food cans in the kitchen cupboard or if I have to fetch them in the basement; trying to keep the balance of paté to shredded so that the cats don't rebel; avoiding kicking the overnight dry food ball that would rattle like a bingo hopper, spitting dusty pellets all over the kitchen floor; gauging the water level in the kettle without turning on the light; finding the box of green tea in the cupboard; pouring water into the mug without turning on the light; remembering where I left my glasses the night before (usually some place where my thought was 'I'll have to remember where I left these in the morning,” but night thoughts and morning thoughts aren't often in conversation); deciding which slippers to wear; putting the phone onto the charging pad; turning on the computer. And here we are.
Awake.
Deciding whether or not the dreams themselves are worth writing about. Realizing that only the faintest of outlines are still there. Wondering if this is what creativity always is. Drinking green tea.