Monday, March 21, 2011

March 21st

I had a nightmare night before yesterday.

In the dream, it was as though I were simultaneously living and staring in a show. Sort of like Truman. My show/life was a horror series, staring a group of female taxi drivers who solve ghost stories, getting the crap scared out of them in the process.

So, it was a new series/night and it was my part. I was standing in this dark trailer park, on thick, dewy grass. There was a picnic table standing between two trailers, with a birthday cake on it. It had a ring of candles, they were lit. They were the only light in the place, a dim cast of light unto the rough boards of the table top.

As I watched, I saw the flames go out, one by one, about the cake. The little bit of light there went out. I turned to my left and saw candles standing in the ground. As I watched, one by the one the small, wavering flames were snuffled out.

I turned to my right and I saw candles lying on the grassy bank. I could see the candles more clearly now, they were those cheap, thin birthday candles with spirals of red and white up them. They spelled a word and the word they spelled was stillborn.

As I watched, the candles of this word began to go out, one by one. Each letter got snuffed into darkness, until there were no word and no light.

I lifted my head and saw a dark figure standing on the other side of the picnic table and all the hair on the back of my neck went up. I thought she's here.

My terror was so great that it did something I have never experienced before in a nightmare. I knew my part in my life/show, was to turn around and run wildly into the dark, back to where my compatriots were waiting, and then we would begin to solve the mystery of the ghost.

But I couldn't. My terror turned to anger. I thought, the hell with this. The hell I'm going to play my part, and run away from this ghost. I'm not giving in to this terror. She's not real.

I started walking straight toward her, taking strong, rapid strides, my back up. I had no weapon, I had no plan. My only plan was to walk straight at her. As I came on, I could see her more clearly, she didn't look frightening at all, though I knew she was dead.

She looked uncomfortable, amazed. She looked behind me, to catch the eye of the directer, with a look like, what the hell is this crazy woman doing? Then she got angry, and I saw she held two wooden handled steak knives crossed across her chest. She looked at me with a sly, evil look. I looked at her like, "Come on, come on you scanky b-tch and try it. Just try it." Then I realized I had a knife too.

I woke up. I still felt the terror all over me, especially when I thought of the word stillborn. But the most lingering impression I got from that dream was one of power.

I can't help but think that I am the most powerful right now that I have ever been. I know that sounds funny or vain, or weird to say. But I don't know how else to describe it, or what other word would work.

Keith ran with me yesterday. It turns out that I have been running three miles. Three miles. That's how far I've been running every other day, for the last two or three weeks. A part of me still doesn't believe that's even humanly possible.

But it's true. My legs are fit for the work, pared down to the task. It's like balm, to know that my body functions as I command it to in this one area. I can't control the biology of conception, but I run, non stop, for half an hour, and during that time, my lungs grow deep and my legs take on the weight. Everything works as it should.

That is a powerful feeling. But more powerful than that, is the one of creative writing. I create an entire world, and it is entirely of myself. I spin reams and reams of words out of nothing. It is as though there were so much resource within me, that I can project out of myself a thing which previously had no form.

Because of this, I get a different perspective on God creating the world, the original Creator, the One who made it possible for me to write, who created me. He made His world real, He gave it true being, self will. I see, in a new way, His breathtaking fearlessness. His power, His courage, the vastness of His resources. They boggle my mind and it causes me to throw my soul down in sheer adoration.

I have to manage my writing better though. It's taking over my whole day and has now crept up into the weekends. The only way I can write during the weekends is if I block Keith out completely and not surprisingly, he's not too fond of this. I'm not too fond of being constantly thrown out of the world I was just sitting in the midst of. Consequently, no one is happy.

My other stories weren't like this. This just crept up on me. I could put the other stories down. This one is constantly calling at me. I feel, all the time, the urge to go over what I just wrote, to pick up the threads and keep weaving it forward. But it doesn't suffer from periods of neglect, though I keep on worrying that it will.

So I have determined that I must stop working on it as soon as Keith comes home, just turn the whole computer off and not write at all on the weekends. And I'm going to have to turn back on the alarms on my phone, to remind me to get up and clean the house for an hour. Sigh.

In the meantime, I'm waiting for Keith to come home from formation and drive me to the doctor's office. I hope they don't have to take any blood.