Pages

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Two Doors

There is the obvious interpretation. There is me, standing in a gauzy white gown, the clock's tick marking my breaths. I am closer to dreams than reality. Always the fear that never the two shall meet.

Then, there is not who I am on this day, right now, but what I do. Writers hesitate, hover, between two distinct states of existence with each phrase that slips free. We seek absolute perfection when trying to recapture the innocent texture of our morning peach's skin against our tongue, a glimmer of realism to quench the reader's palette, yet lay it into the fertile loam of a landscape that exists only in our minds. Is story magic, then, in that unassuming intersection where reality meets dreams, each yielding to the other?

8 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Captures exactly how I was feeling last night. I had a question in the wip I was working on, but I must have spent at least half an hour hesitating between all the choices that I had for answers.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps retain one's childlike outlook to better approach one's dreams.

Or, get stinking drunk so that in one's blurred vision the two doors merge into one. ;-)

Marilyn Brant said...

I'm dancing with this all the time, it seems... I'm unable to see the dream and the reality as distinct states. To me, one always singes the edges of the other.

Vesper said...

What is reality? How do you know all is not a dream? :-)

L.A. Mitchell said...

@Charles...me, too. I was trying to find the name of scientists whom my heroine would have considered her heroes and I think I spent an hour poring over the possibilities.

@Todd...since the former has not worked, I'm all for the latter :)

@Marilyn...You talk to your characters at the grocery story, don't you? ;)

@Vesper...how very deliciously philosophical, V :)

the walking man said...

on the other side it is all reality to someone, the art is making their reality yours with the intent of making your reality theirs.

Barbara Martin said...

Whether in dreams or reality it comes down to choices and the consequences of that choice.

laughingwolf said...

is it not the australian aborigines who say we all walk in the dreamworld and meet reality only in sleep?