Sleepwriting

Supposedly Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Edison are among the many creative minds to claim substantial inspiration from their dreams.  Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement) chronicled his own sleeping hours in the lyrical film Dreams, a pilgrim’s journey through Van Gough paintings, war zones, peaceful villages, and hell itself.  What are dreams?  Do we glimpse in them a world of pure imagination unfettered by the limitations of our own?  It would seem so.  I can zoom through space and time, survive death and have sex with beautiful strangers.

The Bard asks, “…in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”  Might we meet imagination itself, the writer of our narrative existence?  The real Willy Wonka?

I’m a little worried about that, because Wonka can be creepy.  The original depiction by Roald Dahl is no less cynical than those by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp.  He lets the little dreamers literally destroy themselves in Candyland.  But it’s his house, his rules.  There is always a shadow to be found in dreams; always a nightmare to shake us up.  We are uncomfortable even in the cradle of imagination.  “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and we aren’t meant to forget it.

Last night I dreamed several good stories, scenes and off-color jokes.  Where’s my Lifetime Achievement Award?