| By Lauren Taglienti |
Today is yet another day, just like all the rest, where all I want to do is write all day and night. Write a poem. A short story. A new chapter of my novel. Even just a journal entry. Maybe even all of the above if I stay up late enough. I want to write all the time. I often need to remind myself that no matter what I do, I am writing. It makes anything I do that is not typing or putting pen to paper more bearable.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Living is writing an active narrative. It's like being in a lucid dream. Sometimes in a lucid dream, I'm in a setting that I don't understand, but I can navigate my way around it and make choices. The happenings of life happen all around me, and I have no control over them. However, I can choose how I respond to life happening and proceed accordingly. That's what characters in a story do, as well as the writers who write those characters. When both lucid dreaming, writing, and living, sometimes the narrative ends up in a place I didn't think it would. I then think, "Okay, how do we proceed from here?"
Most of my dreams are lucid, so I essentially have the privileged capability to write in my sleep. I run through events that my mind fabricates, which range from fictional wars to historical fiction to feminist dystopias to interpersonal relationships and much much more. Lucid dreaming feels like living in alternate dimensions, like the ones in Rick & Morty.
The unconscious mind is a brilliant place, whether lucid dreaming or not, and much of human life is spent sleeping. In high school, I didn't consider sleeping living. I would say such seemingly rebellious, but actually just careless, phrases like, "I'll sleep when I'm dead," or "I don't need to sleep," or "I don't sleep." Even now, I'd rather stay up late clanging my fingers on the keyboard to form words and sentences rather than sleep. A reminder to myself: Yes, I need sleep, and I'll actually sleep while I'm alive, thank you very much. Just like living is writing, sleeping is writing because sleeping is living. The human experience is not developed if sleep is not involved. It's funny: it's almost like when my doctors tell me that I need to make sure I sleep enough that they know what they're talking about. Who would've thought?
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels
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