011. (all of your dreams will become part of the future)
Aaaaaaah! Hello! I have news. Oh, I'm a little bit panicked about this already, and I'm almost sure I won't get very far with it, but...you guys, I think I'll be giving National Novel Writing Month a shot this year. It's something I've wanted to try for a while, but in the past I've always been either "too busy" (or actually, seriously too busy) to write hundreds to thousands of words of fiction every single day for a whole month, or I've chickened out more openly, on the grounds that I "write bad fiction," "can't come up with a plot," "can't come up with characters," "can't write dialogue," and so on, and so on. This year I definitely have the time, and I think having some kind of structured creative project to work on will be good for me. I'm sure that most of what I write will be pretty bad fiction, but I've decided I shouldn't let that stop me, since the only way most people are ever going to do anything well is to spend a very long time doing it not-so-well. Yes, my plot will be a disjointed mishmash of cliches, stuff I stole from dreams I had, situations and dramatic twists I basically ripped off from my favorite books and plays and movies and television shows and so on, and, if all else fails, throwing any weird or beautiful or funny thing I can come up with at the story, whether it fits at all or not, and hoping with my fingers crossed that it sticks. (And that's a best-case scenario!) But why not? I'm not going to be graded on this, I'm not going to get paid for this, and if it's really awful, no one besides me even has to ever see it! This is an incredibly low-stakes challenge.
It was reading about different types of writer's block and how to overcome them almost immediately after re-reading this interview with Miranda July that gave me the confidence to make this decision. So far, I just have some rambling notes about characters (I only feel like I have a real handle on the personality of one out of probably three protagonists/viewpoint characters, though she's starting to have a weird, fun-to-write voice and I quite like her) and about (what passes for) a plot. Progress is progress, all the same, and it isn't bad for a couple of hours' thinking and typing. My long-distance girlfriend is visiting me from tomorrow this afternoon until the end of the month, so I don't know how much more I'll develop these ideas on paper (or MS Word document) before I start having to try and actually write the actual novel, but I could get a solid five to ten pages from what I have right now. And I'll keep thinking.
Tonight I learned a fascinating and scary possible fact about dreams:
While it's believed that the majority of us dream in color, its estimated that roughly one person in eight is limited to black and white dreamscapes. But this wasn't always the case. Research on dreams from the first half of the 20th century suggests that the vast majority of people actually used to dream in black and white. But beginning in the sixties, the balance began tipping in the direction of color dreaming. What accounted for this shift? According to Dundee University's Eva Murzyn, the advent of Technicolor (i.e., color movies and television):
"It suggests there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed."
But here's the real kicker: according to Murzyn, if one looks even further back in history - back before even black and white television came on the scene - all evidence suggests we were dreaming in color.
WOW. Wow. I dream in color, was horribly upset when I read in a book that most people dreamed exclusively in black and white or grayscale (the book itself wasn't all that old, so I assume the author was relying on very outdated research for this information), and immediately sent text messages to several people in my acquaintance to ask whether they dreamed in color or not. Everybody said they did, to my relief. I guess it could be seen as sort of patronizing or ableist for me to say this, but I would be sad to know that someone wasn't able to dream in color. It seems like such a loss, like they'd be missing out on a great experience. Then again, I don't think most people really care about missing experiences they have never had and can't imagine having, and I don't think most people in my culture think their dreams are all that important.
I wonder if this means that the experience of watching a film mimics the experience of actual dreaming with more fidelity than all other art forms. What might early exposure to the internet do to dreaming? I wonder if more people in my generation are synesthetes than in my grandparents' generation. There's supposed to be a link between dreaming in color (especially consistently dreaming in vivid and intense color) and synesthesia.