Week 7 Story: A Writer Dreams

It happened again: Amelia had dreamed an amazing dream, something that would make a great short story, or maybe a screenplay, but by the time she got out of bed and went to her study to write it down, only bits and pieces were left. Something about a car chase, and having to get to a ferry, or was it the train station, and then there had been a bridge. Connecting two mountain peaks. Clouds. And money, lots of money, in the glovebox of the car. She just couldn't remember how it all fit together.

"Dammit, Zoe, it happened again," she complained to her partner, who was already eating breakfast in the kitchen. "I had another one of those amazing dreams for a story, but then I couldn't put it together when I went to write it down."

"I keep telling you," Zoe replied calmly, "you just need to keep a notebook right by the bed. I'm not kidding. You can turn on the light if you need to, whatever, that's fine. Just write it down right away and you can..." The cuckoo clock interrupted her. "Uh-oh, I'm late." She got up, gave Amelia a hug, and then grabbed her briefcase. "I've got to run; call me later! I won't be back until really late tonight, so don't wait up."

Amelia took Zoe's advice to heart, and before she even got dressed, she went into her study and started rummaging through the big file cabinet full of random office supplies until she found an old spiral notebook. A friend had given it to her years ago, and swore it was a lucky notebook for some reason. Perfect. She then found a ballpoint pen that had a clip where she could tie some string, and then…. a few minutes later, she had her solution: a notepad with a ballpoint pen tied to the spiral so that even if she dropped the pen in the dark, she'd be able to retrieve the pen in order to write down her genius dream.

Now she just had to have another genius dream.

She made sure to not drink any coffee after dinner. She turned off the TV at 9PM. She took some melatonin. She did yoga for a half hour. She burned some incense. She read some poetry out loud. She ran her hand lovingly over the spines of all the books on the bookshelves in her study. And then she went to bed, with the notebook on her bedside table.

And it happened! Another genius dream! It was incredible, even better than the night before. The best idea for a story she had ever had. The best story ever written. She grabbed the notebook and pen and put it all down on paper without even opening her eyes so that it would all be perfectly clear the next morning …exactly right… the story… it was going to be so great… "Hey, Zoe," she said, giving her sleeping partner a kiss on the shoulder. "Zoe, it worked."

And so Amelia went happily back to sleep, and she dreamed happy dreams.

I'll publish it in a magazine, a good one, you know, The New Yorker.
And then I'll get a grant from a foundation. Something big. Money to live on. MacArthur!
That way I can write my novel.
And then they'll make the novel into a movie. A movie with Meryl Streep.
I'll win the Academy Award for screenwriting.
And then I'll publish another novel.
I'll win the American Book Award.
They'll make me a professor somewhere. Somewhere nice. Santa Barbara, so I can go to the beach.
And then I'll get the call. From Stockholm.
The Nobel Prize for Literature. And I'll need to write a speech. The best acceptance speech ever.
And something really nice to wear. REALLY nice.
Plus a first-class ticket. They pay for you to fly first-class if you win the Nobel Prize, right?
I'll need my passport of course.
Oh my god, my passport. Where is it? It's not here, wait, no, not here. WHERE IS MY PASSPORT? I have to find it. I'm late. The plane. The Nobel Prize. My speech. WHERE IS MY PASSPORT?

And so Amelia woke up, gasping as she flailed in the bed, the sheets wrapped all around her arms and legs.

"Girl, what's wrong?" Zoe asked, honestly concerned. She was already awake, pulling on her clothes in the half-light of early morning.

"Oh," Amelia said groggily. "I just had this dream, it was, well, I was going to Stockholm, oh wait, I was going to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize because of the AWESOME STORY that I am going to write!"

And she jumped out of bed, reaching for the notebook to remind herself of her great idea. "Listen, I'll tell you exactly what it's about."

But when Amelia grabbed the notebook and looked, she saw that the writing was barely legible: White suits. Nobody remembers. No memory. [illegible; maybe Doctors?] come. [scrawl] it [illegible; maybe words? works?] One grl knows. they try to stop. sheremembers.

The look on Amelia's face told Zoe everything she needed to know.

"It's okay, sweetie," Zoe said. "I officially give you the Nobel Prize for good intentions. You can try again tonight. And now, I'm going to go make us some coffee."

As Zoe headed into the kitchen, Amelia stared down at the page, wondering if she could somehow conjure up the dream story again. Nothing.

But she carefully turned the notebook to the next blank page and put the pen beside the notebook. "It can't hurt," she said to herself.

And she made a mental note to go make sure her passport was still in that file folder marked P for Passport. Just in case.

~ ~ ~

Author's Notes. This is a version of an Indian folktale, The Broken Pot. In that story, a man has a pot of rice, which he plans to sell so he can buy two goats, which will grow into a herd, which he will sell to buy cows, and then buffaloes, and finally he will buy a house, and get a wife, and they will have a son, and when his wife doesn't do as he says, he will kick her with his foot... and so he kicks the pot of rice and it spills, covering him with rice. There are many variations on this story: Air Castles.

For my version, I decided to make it a story about a writer who imagines going step by step to winning the Nobel Prize, and I based the writer and her girlfriend on a couple I knew back in college. At the end, the writer doesn't bring about her own loss the way the people do in the folktales (the man who spills the rice or the ghee or the honey or the oil, or the woman who spills the milk, etc.), but I still thought it was a fun way to come up with a new twist on the same kind of "air castle" where we dream up something elaborate, step by step by step, that ends up going nowhere at all.

Bibliography. Jacobs' Indian Fairy Tales: The Broken Pot.
Image. I scribbled the words on a piece of paper and took the picture.

And while it's not quite the same idea, here's a fun cartoon from Debbie Ridpath-Ohi about the fantasy of writing a novel that you don't have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite: