Perchance To Dream

I have been reading Stephen King, which is out of character for me. Usually it's Virginia Woolf, or Eudora Welty, or Charlotte Bronte, or Jane Austen, or Henry James, or Barbara Pym. The living writers I am stuck on are Annie Proulx, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham. I await their books like an eager lover. But this Stephen King thing is new, and unanticipated, and, frankly, a little scary. Scary not because of his label as a horror writer, but because of the other subject matter he delves into, and does so incredibly well. Mainly, the scariness of being a writer at all. Even a writer of shlocky books. For even writers of shlocky beach-read best-sellers are tapping into something huge, and very much beyond us in our usual rounds of work and errands and drive-through McDonald's meals. Something that is lovely beyond belief, and also extremely frightening. He says in the book I'm reading now, Bag of Bones that the skin of the visible world is thin. And he is right. There is so much more beneath the surface, and it feels like a really real place, too.
For writers, the trance state we enter when we're in "the zone" leads us to that place. Even when we're writing stupid things, even when we're writing chick-lit, even when we're writing about bankers or IRS agents. And even when it's scary, we want to be there, maybe more than we want to be in the real world. I always think that really only my dogs keep me tethered here, instead of spinning both bright and very dark fictions in that trance forever. So, I am hooked on Stephen King because perhaps more than any writer, living or dead, he gets it right. How that is, to enter that bright and dark place, to want more than anything to stay there for awhile, maybe forever. And how things from that world break into this one, often around writers or artists.
Of course, that trance state is most analagous to dreaming, really is a kind of waking dream state. And it's the same in that sometimes you just don't want to wake up. If the dream is a good one, or if it's just so real it seems rude to leave it. Sometimes on waking it's this world that seems wrong, and we can't seem to shake that dream. So, start paying attention to them rather than trying to always slough them off. Keep a dream notebook by your bed, and on awakening, commit Acts of Attention to them. The funny ones, where you're knitting an office building, the ones where you're dancing with an old flame and don't want to ever wake up, even the scary ones where a huge lumberjack in a red flannel shirt is standing in your bedroom doorway, looming and terrifying you by having no face. Sometimes the only way to shake them is to face them. So if you Perchance To Dream, you know what to do.