Dreaming

It is always interesting to me when I get the opportunity to listen when someone else tells the story of their dreams. Not only because I love to hear stories at any time, even the strange jumps and links that are the staple of dreams, but because when I remember my dreams, I cannot remember images, neither black and white nor color. No, when I dream, I dream words.

I started reading when I was very young. My parents tell me that I could follow Dr. Seuss before I could talk. My father read me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings before I was old enough to remember clearly.

Today, I can easily read a hundred pages in about an hour—more or less depending on the book. As I walk or drive through the streets, my eyes continually look about me to read signs, billboards, and license plates. As I sit at the breakfast table, I read nutrition information, the backs of cereal boxes, anything and everything that I can see.

In all that I do, I am surrounded by words. I have soaked up Shakespeare and Chaucer, Tolkien and Asimov, romances and fantasies, literature and children’s fiction. Is it any wonder that when I dream, I am bombarded by words?

The people that I know are paired with situations that I’ve been in. Music is juxtaposed with mayhem, scenes from my day are repeated as I hear the words that were spoken and read the setting that I have written in the fabric of my mind. I read scenes of helplessness and power in my dreams, thoughts of falling and flying, all in words that lead me, the reader, to experience what I am presented with.

And so I write. I cannot help but do so, for the words that I feel inside my dreams will not remain silent. I am bombarded with words that describe the images that I see and words that begin stories that cannot be silenced.

Sometimes I wonder how people can live with pictures in their dreams, movie-like without the depth and breadth of the words that form in my dreams. How can they live without the stories that are woven so tightly into my life? Sometimes I wonder if I could be happier without the words that force themselves from my dreams and into concrete form. But no.

Without the words that form my dreams and impose themselves upon my hand, I am nothing.