It all started with a dream…
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, as most of us fans know by now, got started with a dream. She clearly saw Edward and Bella in a sunlit meadow. She heard them discussing the problems inherent to their unique relationship.
It’s all in the dream. It’s the theater of the subconscious.
Creativity lives and breathes here, in the subconscious mind, which is free, limitless, and full of symbols that sometimes interact in very strange ways. The writer, the artist, is the person who allows these symbols to emerge, to take control, even, with no concern for the dictates of the conscious mind. One lets go, one goes with the flow, allowing oneself to be carried by the stream of images, words, feelings, music – whatever it is that moves the artist. One lets go. This is the most important point. One ignores the critic, the censor. One allows characters, words, pictures, or whatever it is, to emerge. Unfettered. Flowing. Incandescent. Glowing. Sparkling.
How very difficult this is at times! ‘Reality’ intrudes. Routines, rules, and regulations must be followed. One must get to work on time. Bills have to be paid. Babies cry for their bottles, and husbands for their dinner. (Even those of us women who don’t have kids, like me, still have the husbands to deal with. But mine is very sweetly content to eat out most of the time, or we buy microwave dinners. )
There are all kinds of inane, trivial, inconsequential things that can mess up one’s creative juices. So one has to set aside whatever time one can, in order to allow the subconscious to possess one’s body, so that it can dance, and flow, and give forth inspiration, and thus comes the book, the painting, the movie, the piano concerto, or the elegant, swan-like movements of a ballet choreography….
It all begins with the dream. It all begins with allowing the dream to live, taking the place of this mundane ‘reality’ we think is real. The secret is that it’s not. What we know as 'reality' is made up of the consensus of the majority. It’s the paradigm created by the majority. So we believe in it, and live by it.
Art and creativity are not the consensus of the majority. They are the special preserve of those who are willing to break away from the majority, by allowing the subconscious mind free play.
More and more, I want to free myself from this oppressive thing we humans call ‘reality’. More and more, I want to simply allow my subconscious mind to have its way with me. This is what it’s doing right now. I have stepped aside, and the words are thus free to flow from within, with no restraint, no obligations to be anything but what they are.
It’s a little like receiving dictation. I’m dictating to myself, except that I am not consciously attempting to control the words that are coming out.
It all started with the dream… It always does.
I want to dream and dream and dream and dance in the light of my dreams which will then become my new reality….
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