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It sure is hard to think about it being 2025. I remember 1975 like it was a couple of years ago. Then I couldn’t imagine being 55. I could imagine flying cars and I figured we’d have those by 2000. Last night when the power went out for my section of Ely and perhaps others, it is always difficult to decipher the grid, I was faced with complete silence and insomnia. Not a good combination. It was actually somewhere around the three something hour and in between power outages. Everyone else in the house, including the nocturnal cats had gone back to sleep.
Shut eye was as elusive for me as the next page of my novel that I’m not exactly stalled on, as much as I’m having trouble catching up to the story. Elusive. I feel as though this constant companion of mine for a decade is suddenly outpacing me, running ahead. This is the way with writing sometimes, or perhaps, always. I’ve got new companions, vying for attention, competing for keyboard time. Some of these, I’m sure, are part of the original novel. Some might be one or two more novels on their own.
It’s hard to say, because they’re new and I haven’t spent as much time with them.
Do you remember your dreams?
Some people are aware that they dream, but cannot remember them.
Some folks swear they’ve never had a dream at all. I remember nearly all of mine, some of them for year, in full color, scene by scene and what music was playing -- just like a movie. Some of my dreams, the more elusive ones, disappear in a swirl of smoke and are gone before my eyes even fully open.
I wish, without really knowing why, that I could remember those, because often they’re accompanied with a great sense of loss as if something great has escaped me. Perhaps some answers, some ideas, some direction.
As with Jacob Marley, whom I once portrayed in college, there’s sometimes more gravy than grave about these dreams of mine. Pizza after seven or a couple of days with too much Sriracha sauce on everything.
Indigestion can turn a literal molehill like the ones in my Grandma Brauer’s backyard back in Illinois in 1975 into a mountain. I spent a fair amount of time squashing those down flat with a hoe.
This novel was reborn, while I slept, about 10 years ago as a dream. After I woke, practically the whole first chapter came out word for word as if I’d been there.
Indeed, earlier that morning, I had been. I’d climbed up the ladder to repaint the sign on the Pizzeria and I’d felt the sun on the back of my neck, the wind pushing against the aluminum ladder rungs while my friend Mike held it from two stories below. I’d slipped my black leather belt out of my Farm-NFleet dark blue jeans (not too short yet cause it was the first day of summer) and anchored the top of the ladder with the belt to the welded pipe frame of the sign. I’d even felt the lips of the girl whose parents owned the pizza place, a couple of years older than me, when she kissed me after giving me a hand up to the top of the flat roof, paint job finished. When I woke I could still taste the licorice flavor of Sambuca that lingered on her lips. I remembered all of our words.
The dream jump-started what had been restlessly sleepwalking in many forms since college and I could see it with such clarity and hear the dialog in my mind that it flowed into place with perfection. It was what had been missing.
Over the years, many moments of trying to forge ahead despite a clear sense of purpose or direction have been thwarted with the need to listen to the silence, to exercise patience. It has been in those times, sometimes through waking daydreams that the answers have come. Believe me, I took down notes. I just can’t always find the notes.
So, in the darkness, chasing sleep and answers to questions that I don’t know how to ask, I waited. The fan, with its wonderful white noise, came on, the phone chargers flashed, the heaters kicked on. I listened to the cat snore. I didn’t get anywhere. Just stayed right where I had been. In the dark about so much to come. But I did say a prayer of thanks for the quick resolution to the electrical outage and the vital heat that was back on. I did thank God for the talent and drive to write in the first place, even though I didn’t always have access to his GPS.
Then, I fell asleep too. I dreamed of feeding all the pages of all my “novels” into an old Corona typewriter, one after another, and when they came out, they fit together perfectly.
