If you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant. The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can - and without talking, without reading the morning's paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before - begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night's dream, a conversation real or imagined, an examination of conscience. Write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet. As a matter of fact, you will find more value in this material than you expect, but your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.
From Dorothy Brande's "Becoming a Writer"
ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Get up a 1/2 hour EARLIER??
It's true what she says, most writers do profess that they need a period of free-form writing everyday to keep things flowing, their mind loose. I tried to do this in the evenings, but my writing journal entries more often than not started out (and this is a direct quote) "I am so tired right now that I'm not even sure that I can write about anything else". You can imagine that a wealth of creativity does NOT often follow such an opening statement. So I've decided to give the mornings a shot and see what happens.
This morning went okay. I got up at 6:30 and nursed Hafsa and then stayed awake instead of going back to sleep. Actually I don't feel too bad. I was crazy for a cup of tea though... but maybe that's because I was dreaming that I was ordering a Turtle Mocha at Caribou Coffee just before waking. I was with my friend Carolyn and she was ordering coffee too, which she never does in real life because she doesn't like coffee. Tea yes, not coffee. Mmmmm, tea.
If you wake up slowly and have a chance to contemplate, like this, you start to remember your dreams rather vividly. Too bad that Turtle Mocha one didn't work out... I do remember that I looked into my wallet to pay for it and all I had was Canadian money. So I probably wasn't going to get it anyway. Also in my dreams last night, a plot to steal some money. For which we needed a vacuum cleaner. And I remember telling my co-conspirators that I had to wait until my kids were sound asleep in bed. We'd have to wait until after 8:30 to execute our plan. Jeez, I'd make a terrible thief. I also dreamt I was shopping in a marketplace looking for a pair of beige pants in countless racks of angora sweaters. My dreams also featured a son, strangely enough. The boy was about 7 or 8 years old. He seemed thoughtful, pensive. He didn't want me to be with him, he wanted to go to the park alone. I smiled and thought to myself, it's happening already, he wants to be grown up, childhood passes by so quickly (extremely quickly in this case). And another dream sketch of someone making oatmeal in my kitchen. I think it was Daniel Vosovic from Project Runway and Stacey, our parent educator at the preschool. All signs point to breakfast... and I will follow the signs...
Good morning all!
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