I was up pretty late last night talking with my best friend on some of the esoterica of religious/spiritual/universal stuff. As a result, when I finally managed to get to bed, my head was full of conceptual structure and some (not terribly, but sort of) deep parts of my mind had been exercised a bit, greasing the rails, so to speak, into that part of me that handles and herds complex ideas into shape.
And at about 3:30AM, I suddenly woke and knew exactly what my novel was going to be about, how it was going to be plotted, and the major interlocking thematic underpinnings (and, no, it didn't have a single thing to do with what we'd been talking about -- it was just the logjam in my head dynamited loose by the conversation I'd been having with one whom I respect and who often makes me think to my limits.)
I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before.
I grabbed my notebook and fumbled around trying to find a pen. I discovered that, for the first time in weeks, I'd left it out in the livingroom, maybe, or somewhere else that wasn't with the notebook. Wherever it was (and I really had no clue, truth be known) would involve me actually getting out of bed and going to get it. I swung my legs over the bed and was about to get up -- then realized that all this, the story/theme/plot/structure was so blindingly obvious that there was absolutely no way that I wasn't going to be able to just start writing in the morning. No need to scuttle around half-blind in the dark trying to scribble legibly in a notebook with sleep-deadened hands. I've got this!
Smiling, I went back to sleep.
And it's fucking gone. Not a shred or a whisper remains, not a single greasy, fading trail marking where it slipped out of my grasp. Nothing.
I am now in the process of convincing myself that it was all bullshit, and there wasn't really anything there in the first place, that it was just a dream, real as a brick while it was happening, but falling apart like a sandcastle at high tide in the light of day.
Yeah. That's working.
Well that sounds frustrating. Maybe it will come to you though, when you're doing something mindless. Like how you try to remember a word or an actor's name and you can't quite get it but then the next day when you're doing dishes you suddenly shout it out.
ReplyDeleteBut if it makes you feel any better, every time I wake up and look at something I wrote down in the middle of the night, it's dumb as shit.
Yup, that's totally what I'm telling myself (e.g., if I'd written it down, it would have been dumb as shit.) I'm taking heart from the fact that I've never written down anything in the middle of the night that was worth a jar of warm spit, and most of it was, in fact, utterly unintelligible, so as they day goes on and the rush fades, I'm less and less likely to assign any real importance to it. But I was so freakin' sure...
ReplyDeleteIt was probably great. Brilliant, even. Screenplay worthy. As tight and professional as any brightly-colored secret-agent-comedy made in the late 1960s when they kept changing directors and writers and the final product was only a hit because the public was experience its first fascination with going to the movies on LSD.
ReplyDeleteDon: Totally. It's like you were there.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, if you're inclined to experiment that direction, I'd strongly recommend giving a miss to "Deep Throat" (for example, the Old Spice shaving scene with the cheery, whistled sea shanty soundtrack is for experienced acid trippers ONLY) and go for "2001 - A Space Odyssey," which was colorfully incoherent enough on a first watching that the fry is almost incidental anyway.
Aaaaaaaaafffggghghhrrrggggh I hate it when that happens!!!
ReplyDeleteOnce I dreamt I was a private detective, and figured out a way to sneak up on people without them noticing me. I half-woke, thinking, oh my god this is incredible. It finally happened (as you say) I have thought of something so awesomely profound it will change my life. I MUST remember this! I must repeat it over and over so it doesn't slip into the realm of lost-short-term-memory-hell. I sat on the edge of the bed, slowly waking up, all the time aware that I must keep thinking about this revelation so that it will not fade away as dreams so often do. And it worked! I finally fully awoke, and the memory of the dream was still in my head, and had translated into long term memory as I had hoped. And it was . . . glue Chicklet gum boxes (the smallish, flat ones) to the bottoms of your shoes.
ReplyDeleteYep. gumshoe. And now the curse: I will NEVER forget that, nor how stupid and irrelevant and dumb it was.
2001 Space Odyssey. I saw it at a drive-in and the movie reels got mixed up and the movie STARTED with the space ship docking, and THEN the segment with prehistoric man, and THEN the trip to Jupiter. And it made sense. I saw it later on TV with all the scenes in their proper order and thought, this is shit.
Roy: Ha! Gumshoe! Made me laugh -- that's so going into something I'm writing. Someday...
ReplyDelete2001: This is in the same category as "Don Quixote" for me -- which is to say, probably damned important work that is nearly impenetrable to us ordinary mortals. Although I suspect that Quixote's problem is more that it is longer than an analytic reading of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I'm not ADD or ADHD or whatever the current buzz-acronym is, but Don Quixote always made me feel like I was developing some personal insight into it.
At least 2001 had shiny stuff and spaceships.