WHO AM I?
Writers are dreamers who gather
imaginations and fantasies and bring them down to words. When the reader reads
what I have written, you read and imagine or experience my dream – and so you
dream along with me. You follow along with my thinking and my path through the
fantasies to the imaginations.
So, as a writer, I must be aware that the reader and I
share an intimate, sacred space. I must be faithful to the reader because you
follow my imagination, my interior becomes your interior, my passions, your
passions (even if only for a while.) I must be cautious about what I write
because it is not only for my self-expression, but what I write goes into your
soul.
It all begins with the writer’s dream and the reader’s
willingness to dream along with him.
When William Shakespeare wrote sonnets to
his lover, he was a writer gathering imaginations and fantasies and bringing
them down to words on paper. Still, the words expressed an intimacy and
knowledge of the lover not known to the ordinary reader. And, when his lover
read his writing, she dreamt of his dream more secretly. She followed along
with his thinking and his path through his intimate fantasies to the
imaginations.
As a writer, Shakespeare was aware that the reader/lover, and he shared a more
intensely intimate, sacred space. He was conscientious about what he wrote
because the response was just as highly charged and evocative for his lover as
it is for him – and only slightly less for we readers hundreds of years later.
WHY AM
I HERE?
The reader or dreamer of the writer's
dream has what may be called a Night Man Consciousness versus a Day Man
Consciousness. The Day Man Consciousness begins when you wake in the morning
and drag your emotions and body out of bed and ends when you go to sleep at
night. The Day Man consciousness is sense-bound. When the Day Man lays down to
rest, the body and energetic self, your Night Man, arises and unfolds. This is
a deeper sleeping than the reader's sleep.
The Day Man believes that all of life is measured by its
accomplishments – the stuff of your to-do list, what you post on Facebook and
tuck into photo albums - the resumes, degrees, awards, milestones along the
concentric circles of your life: business trips, family carpooling, small-town
worries, shopping, and Starbucks, culminating in a headstone.
The Day Man in space, the Night Man, exists in time.
His/Her existence is measured in cycles of time, rhythmical patterns, seasonal
revels, festivals, evolution, joy, warm welcomes, canning, gardens, growth,
children, and all expressions of love.
The Night reveals a world qualitatively different from the experience of
the day.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet XLIII is the dream in which the dreamer meets the lover in
the night – this is dreamer writing the dream in which he describes the Dream
Lover.
“When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
And thou, whose shadows shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes they shade shines so!
How would, I say, my eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay
All days are nights till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams
doth show me thee.”
When you now, hundreds of years after it was first written, re-read
Shakespeare’s dream of the Dream Lover, a mood of the night remains. A feeling
perhaps. Not the stuff of Day Man Consciousness.
WHAT
DO I WANT?
We are all sleepers in the dreams of others. Before
you were born, lofty spiritual beings dreamed you into existence. Where are
they now? Who is dreaming the dream of you? Who is writing your story? Whose
ideals or ideas fill your inner world? Where do you go when you sleep? With
whom do you commune? Who is it that dreams that “deep and dreamless sleep” as
silent stars go by over the Little Town of Bethlehem? When, where and why will
we awaken, lose our illusions or become disenchanted? As D.H. Lawrence writes
in “The Song of the Man Who Has Come
Through”,
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door of the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No. No, it is the three strange angels
Admit them, admit them
©
Copyright 2014, Jean W. Yeager
All
Rights Reserved
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