Dream on

Here’s another insight to add to the list of what “they” advise would-be book writers to do: Read books. (If life were only that simple.) What they never tell you to do is dream.

Not the kind you do when you’re asleep. I mean the kind you do when you’re sitting on your front porch thinking about what to write about in this week’s blog post — maybe something motherly in honor of Mother’s Day — and in order to concentrate, you close your eyes … and dream.

I’m good at that. I do it all the time. Well, not all the time, just all the time when I’m writing. The less astute among us would call this daydreaming. Not me. This is writing. Writing stories in my head.

The first story I remember dreaming up was a Grade 3 homework assignment. I don’t remember the teacher’s prompt, but I bet it wasn’t “Write a story about how you tricked your parents,” although that turned out to be the gist of my story.

One night, I must have been acting up and my mother sent me to my room. Which meant no TV for me that night. Sometime after that, I wrote my homework assignment, loosely based on the truth. I wrote, truthfully, that I had been sent to my room, my room shared a wall with the den, where the TV was on, and from my bedroom window, I could see the neighbor’s TV set in their living room. The fiction I created was that I could hear the TV show through the wall while watching the show on the neighbor’s TV. Which was pretty clever, had it been true.

Maybe the teacher’s prompt was “Write about something good that happened to you,” and when nothing good came to mind, I made up a story. The truth is the neighbor’s TV was so far away, I couldn’t tell what show they were watching, plus, the wall that separated my room from the den muffled the sound on our TV. But the story sounded good, and the teacher gave me an A. I suspect my mother would have given my diabolical tricks a D-.

I said earlier that I don’t dream all the time. That’s true. Now that I am an adult, I have taken on adultish ways, most of them not conducive to dreaming. But I did a fair amount of it as a kid. My mother’s refrain “Get your head out of the clouds” still rings in my ears. Nowadays I dream only when I’m writing. I sit on my front porch, the spring breezes lulling my eyes to close, and I dream. It’s especially fun when I’m writing fiction. The shenanigans my characters dream up in my dreams always keep me amused.

Happy Mother’s Day, all you moms with kids who make your life interesting. A day late, but still heartfelt.

A little dreaming to music this morning. Archie Roach, from down under.