The Dream Life of Writers
Agnès Madrigal
As writers, we all dream of stories, usually when we are awake. But how often do we, while sleeping, dream that we are writing down the words of a new novel? This text describes the interweaving of the conscious writer, riddled by the suggestions of a dream.
I suppose that the dream life of writers is not so fundamentally different from the dream lives of others. All of our dreams tell stories of various kinds, some strange, some frightening, some utterly indecipherable. I don’t find that I write from my dreams very much, though I have integrated dreams into my characters’ stories sometimes—for example, the protagonist Viola, in the novel Jess, has a particular dream that alters the arc of that story profoundly (but I won’t give anything away here).
My own dreams tend to be more purely personal, more deeply symbolic, sometimes making a change in psyche, but seldom disrupting my life. I have dreams of New York City, but not the New York City I live in; it is a different New York, one with a West Village similar to the one I know, but with a different tightly gridded maze of streets, different tidy shops and European-like cafés—I visit the same dream version of this city each time, and I have gotten to know my way around it. I have a “Dream Paris” and a “Dream Florence” as well, the latter of which includes an enormous Duomo rising above the town, with busy highways that loop around the great orange dome like the rings that encircle Saturn. The fields outside of the “dream town” of my hometown light up under blackened night skies as though lit by the powerful lamps that brighten nighttime baseball games, and my mother’s old house and outbuildings are still there but arranged differently, on a slope to the west of the town, complete with the horses and some twisted elms, though she is no longer there and I’ve not returned to the house, long ago sold, in several years.
When a writer dreams, does she dream of new stories? Photograph by Tasi Pas
I do not dream of stories, although I would certainly accept such gifts if the dream angels, or whatever entities determine our dreams, so offered. Stories come to me in other ways, more hard-wrought ways in most cases. They appear quite magically, once they do, and usually only after a hard beckoning for months, maybe years. Often they arrive well after painstakingly testing out words, sentences, ideas on pieces of paper, just to have those words dead-end unto themselves or to watch such ideas dissolve into bland and plotless inky corpses of sorts. Plots happen in my dreams, certainly, some present clear conflicts and resolutions, and others do not, but none of them seem like stories to be written down. That is not what dreams are about intrinsically—though I would love for my stories to delve into what these dreams are otherwise doing, to probe the dark and delicate loam of the sub-conscious, of memory, of ancestry, of whatever else is there.
“[New stories] are not what dreams are about intrinsically—though I would love for my stories to delve into what these dreams are otherwise doing, to probe the dark and delicate loam of the sub-conscious, of memory, of ancestry, of whatever else is there.”
—Agnès Madrigal
So it is interesting to find myself recently writing in a dream. I am writing in my dream what I believe are the first sentences of my new book. To backtrack, before this dream, I had just had that moment of breakthrough, that glint of light where one thinks they might have a story again, something worth exploring for however many thousands of words it will require, something to roll around in for the next year or however long it takes the story to then emerge in all of its parts—to reveal itself under the right temperatures for such thoughts, to align itself with the writer’s own proclivities, which we know can be quite impossible at times. Like all new stories, I don’t know all there is to know about it, only that certain fragments of scenes are revealed and begin to persist, in this case, I have the image of a man who wears a long silk-like robe reminiscent of garments from a religious order. Artists wore these robes in the early twentieth century; priests wear them still. ‘Where do I go with this?,’ the writer wonders.
The new story was going to start something like this: “I don’t know where this story begins.” I have always wanted to commence a story with these words, and this story gave itself up to me in exactly that sentence, those words repeating in my mind like the words of a story do—resonant, echoing words as though told from another voice, one that seems not solely my own when it speaks. I’ll not attempt to explain this story yet, or how the rest of the first paragraph had begun to unfold before the dream. In the dream, I am writing on red paper. I am writing with big spaces between the words, spaces much too large for any editor to condone. But I am writing in ink still, the story is just beginning, with these holes inside of it. In the dream, I am told this: “Begin from his perspective, with his observations.” And that was what I was writing, in the dream: the first time he lays eyes upon the foggy neighborhood, the small painted wood church at the end of the street, the colorful plastic garbage cans lined on the curbs on Wednesday nights, the three barking dachshunds in the corner apartment building, the traffic sounds from the busier street a block away.
“The new story was going to start something like this: ‘I don’t know where this story begins.’ I have always wanted to commence a story with these words, and this story gave itself up to me in exactly that sentence, those words repeating in my mind like the words of a story do—resonant, echoing words as though told from another voice, one that seems not solely my own when it speaks.”
—Agnès Madrigal
I don’t know where this story begins. Maybe it begins with his thoughts, as the dream recommends. Maybe it is with his freshly minted impressions as he enters the neighborhood, the one now well engraved into the narrator’s memory. Surely he doesn’t engage with this story in the way that he assumes—already another is conspiring around him, challenging his thoughts, distorting them to fit the story, the devious writer with her whirling ink pen. The protagonist will meet this character and she will change him, too, as he will change her—the author at least knows this, if not much more at this stage in the story’s birthing. But neither of the characters know any of this yet, and the writer little more. They are all, all three of them, still lurking within the gauzier corridors of the writer’s mind, about to emerge in written letters and words, characters and scenes. The story itself is something of a dream, another kind of dream.