For me

“Writing a story is like playing out your dreams while you are awake, you have to be delicate and wildly daring too”.

It is not about being inspired by your dreams, it is rather consciously exploring the unconscious, drinking at it, reach for the life of it and then remould it in words, to create your own dream. This link to the dreamlike world is not something that is equally strong in all of us. I think some of us are just graced/disgraced with this fatal attraction to it. We cannot escape it, so we write, draw, compose, work, run, photograph … to find our own way to make it live in the world. Some people are sort of immune, or indifferent to it. It just work differently for them.

It can be scary, for I personally feel as if the border between this and insanity is sometimes a very thin line. A rope on which I cannot avoid stepping, to cross a chasm that I need to cross in order to be balanced. Creating these universes, these visions, “writing” this way is something I started doing since much before I jotted down a single written word in form of a “real story”. This drives me to dreamlike (#dreams) things, in a way: “to another world”.

I remember the moment it all started. I must have been 9/10 years old, I was still attending the obligatory schools. I did not know at the time but it was a life-changing experience. It was night and I woke up from a dream. Waking up that way broke the dream. I remember feeling lost and the clear sensation of having interrupted something that should have not been interrupted. It gave me a childish sense of false guilt. I left my bed in my pj to go to my parents room. That was something totally unusual for me. Once in front of their bedroom door I did not feel like going in, what if dad or mom would have been dreaming too? I got back to my bed and tried to continue the dream. I closed my eyes and laid down pieces of the dream I had. Images, moments, hints of a possible continuation. The morning after I woke after the dream sort of continued from where it left. Not quite, but it was connected. As I said I did not know at the time, but I now recognise that as the moment that changed it all. The event that then blossomed into how I write, compose, or do anything creative. The realisation that I could consciously connect to my subconscious. Yes, I know I could be considered insane for this (as many other) thing(s). Still, this is it.

Most of the times this is my mindset when writing a little story, a poem, etc. Writing let me intentionally dream while I am still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday’s life. It is also a way of descending deep into my own consciousness and perceptions. Sometimes a way to understand, decrypt things buried deep in me. There are times in which it does not trigger though, not immediately. I have learnt to accept it (#acceptance). When it starts, however, it just flows, I must should handle control as I must do in life, when I totally completely trust (#trust).