what dreams may come (and how to stop procrastinating on your daily writing exercise)

Do I get a prize for the longest post title ever? The satisfaction of it, huh? Man, that's lame.

So thanks to a Twitter tip from @motjustes, I came across this fabulous tool for procrastinating writers. It's called Write Everyday, and alls you have to do is click this link and enter the minimum time you want to write. It gives you a prompt and a timer. Away you go! Amazing.

I realize that someone who's considered herself a writer for a quarter-century should possibly be a little more self-disciplined. But there is not a whole lot of self-discipline about me, and it's better to know yourself (and find ways to successfully trick yourself into being a better person) than to hold yourself to impossible standards and berate yourself for falling short thereof. And so on. So that's my take on that.

Anyway, using this tool (which I learned of yesterday) I have actually written for two whole days in a row. How 'bout it?! And no, it's not great literature, but it is writing with ye olde creative bente, and just now I turned out more than 500 words before even starting this blog post. Ooh, ouch, I think I just pulled a muscle patting myself on the back. Still, it's a decent accomplishment, and one that far outstrips not freewriting 500-plus words today.

Sooo, in case you haven't gotten enough of my brain ramblings for today, you can read what I wrote from the prompt below. The prompt was, "When I wake up in the morning, the first thing to cross my mind is..." It's not the world's greatest prompt, but it still did the trick. The prompt I used yesterday was better, but being a bear of very little brain, I can no longer remember it. I may, however, go eat some honey now. Enjoy the further ramblings.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing to cross my mind is usually the fleeting footfalls of my dream hieing itself back into my subconscious. Sometimes it takes me a minute or two to realize that I'm actually awake, so engrossed is my mind in continuing the train of thought in the dream.

In pregnancy I dream vividly. As someone who loves to interpret dreams, and has what you might call a well thumbed dream dictionary (if you wanted to be unkind, you might call it a tattered, falling apart dream dictionary), the pregnancy dreams are none too difficult to interpret. Occasionally a more obscure symbol will surface (what does my fat orange tabby cat mean to me, really, and why was I taking her to the amusement park with my husband and apparently already-born baby?) but for the most part, it's pretty straightforward.

There's no question that my brain considers dreaming heavy therapy, and discusses a lot of my issues with itself on the flickering screen of my mind. I suspect most of my dreams are about my fears, at least, of the dreams that I can remember. Some are about my joys, and a few are about my hopes. Perhaps my subconscious considers my waking brain to spend more than its fair share of time on my joys and hopes, and wants to even the score. Occasionally I'll have a dream that's more like living in an alternate reality than a dream, or one that predicts the future, if only I could realize that when I wake up instead of when the shit actually goes down in the future and I think, "Oh, right, I dreamed about this."

Perhaps two of my favorite dreams involved me beating the shit out of someone I hated - both times featured the same girl, who as you can imagine, I really, really, really did not like. (Bear in mind that I have never in my waking life beat anybody up. I do kill spiders, though.) It was disturbing, naturally, but what was perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that it was oh, so satisfying. I'd like to think that much of the satisfaction came from the fact that I would never really beat someone up, but it also could have come from the fact that I was beating the shit out of this godawful, horrible, evil person. In fact, I even hated her less after the dreams, perhaps because I'd worked out my anger so very thoroughly in my mind. Who knows?

Anyway, it's been lo, these many years since I had a violent dream like that (nine or ten, to be precise, and oh, dear god, I just realized my ten-year college reunion is coming up next summer - talk about nightmares). Nowadays they're much more realistic, except for the cat at the amusement park thing. Oh, and the recent journey through a cave and up the magical holy mountain with a good friend. Okay, maybe they're not really that realistic nowadays either. But really, what are dreams for?

songs for abigail

Today is the year anniversary of my daughter's stillbirth.

I don't have a lot to say about it, at least right now. I've written about it a lot in past weeks, and talked about it with very close friends, but right now I just find myself sort of wordless and grieving.

Still, I would like to share these poems I wrote in the days after her stillbirth. I wrote many, many poems in those days, but these are my two favorites, in order of favoritism.

Songs for Abigail

VI

Still the bells and muffle the drums;
with solemn step the parents come.
With weeping hearts and lowered eyes
they curse the day that Abigail died.

Let the trees shed their leaves in the summer field
Let the autumn harvest refuse to yield
Let the birds fold their wings and forsake the sky
The world must be broken, that Abigail could die.

Tell the mourners in a somber throng
To quiet their cries and swallow their song
Let the silence beg the question why,
of all that is possible, Abigail should die.

Stop the waves on the ocean’s shore
Stop the seasons’ changes evermore
Stop the sun in its eternal sky
Let the world mourn that Abigail has died.


III

It’s rained every day since you died.
As if the world weeps with us
and the clouds could swaddle our grief.

A hollow place in the world
echoes with your absence
the space where you should be, and aren’t.

I can almost feel on my pinky finger
where your grip should curl, and surprise me
with its strength. But your hand lies motionless.

It is hard to believe our hearts can keep beating
when yours is silent forever.
That was not the miracle I expected from your birth.