Sometimes dreams can be frustratingly beautiful. Most commonly, when I have a dream with a backstory and a context, I experience the dream as a piece of that wider context. It almost always falls apart on waking. That's often because what feels complete and interconnected with that contextual past doesn't actually make sense. 

Painting works like that too. My usual example is this: in my mind I can imagine a painting with a tree, a mountain, and a rising sun and compositionally it seems perfect. But when I try to set it down on paper, immediately there are conflicts. The slightly-off center tree interferes with the mountain in ways I didn't 'see' in my mind. And the sun rising to one side of the mountain, so ideal in my mind, suddenly has a sloped bottom edge that I didn't 'see' and is much farther to the side that I realized. Also, how is the tree rooted? Is the ground that the tree is rooted to below the canvas, unseen, or on canvas? Is it flat? Is it sloped? How does that related to the mountain, and the rising sun? And what are the actual proportions (sizes in relation to each other) of these objects?

In other words, the reality of the tree, the mountain, and the sun can never express what I imagine in my mind, because my mind arranges things in more than two dimensions and with a lot of wibbly, wobbly (to borrow from BBC's Dr. Who circa 2007) composition-y stuff, where edges, interactions, intensity of colors, and shapes are constantly moving and changing depending on where in my mind I 'look'. But when I put them on canvas, they can't move or adapt anymore to suit my aesthetic vision.

That didn't happen in this dream. Okay, it did, a little, but the context (one year after my father died, which was actually 34 years ago this last Christmas) and the background, that I was still heavily in grief and writing with a creativity and intensity that I'd seldom experienced before, didn't have any wibbly, wobbly parts. They were clear and made sense in relation to the dream-as-experienced, even after I woke up.

I feel compelled to write as much about it as I can now, while I can, so that I can preserve the background, context, and content. This dream matters to me.

I was somewhere public in a building hall with chairs and tables lined up on one side, intimate and a little dim, with light coming down from high windows. I had written something really intense. 

It was a poem. I'm not great at poetry. I have to wait around for one to come along, instead of composing poetry like I would any other writing I do. Often my poems are missing parts, because of the fact that I'm trying to pin down something slippery and elusive. I haven't developed the skill set to do something with these broken, ephemeral things, so I usually leave them as-is. Sometimes I include them in my books as a bit of song heard in passing through a city, or part of an opera, or an intimate letter, etc.

In the dream I was sharing the poem with various people in this hall, having them read it silently individually. Every single one reacted powerfully, usually silently or just with a few quiet words. Well, word got around in the dream world. An accomplished musician-writer-poet came up to me asking to read it, as he'd heard a lot of people raving about it. 

I could tell that he was skeptical. He saw me as an amateur that was getting praise because people were being nice, not because I'd written something that was actually good. 

In the dream, I didn't mind. Normally in the conscious world I often react with a 'oh, they found me out, because I know deep down I'm a fraud' feeling, and nod, or shrug, or both. What can you do, after all? Most writers I know have similar feelings, and the ones that keep writing just accept that the feeling is part of being a writer. It's very common to suffer from imposter syndrome sometimes, or even all of the time. Sometimes it hits hard and makes me doubt everything I'm doing, but most of the time it's something that disappears when I'm actually creating. It's essential to ignore or better yet get rid of that feeling, or I'll write self-consciously and write a lot of crap while trying to not be a fraud. The more I've practiced writing, the less often imposter syndrome appears. It usually turns up when I'm trying out something really difficult or new that falls far short of my hopes and expectations, criticizing me at a subconscious or semi-conscious level.

This time, in the dream, I didn't get the feeling, or accept that the poem was probably crap. As far as I was concerned, I didn't write it. I explained to him, as best I could, that my grief is the author of the poem, not me. In the dream, I loved my grief's poem, and I knew other people loved my grief's poem. I didn't explain, but I felt, that the poem didn't have to be a great work of art to affect the people who read it. It just was itself. The fact that people were reacting to it didn't mean that it was a really good poem, but maybe, it was a sign that it expressed something, either perfectly or imperfectly, that people embraced and related-to. 

He asked to read it, and instead of handing him my journal, I said, "follow me." I took him to a long, narrow room with a small bed, some wibbly wobbly furnishings, and it was quite dark and unkempt, with laundry scattered about and nothing put away in its proper place. 

I had painted the poem on the wall. 

In the dream, over and over, I had read this poem, and sometimes the people I handed the poem to read parts of it aloud. 

It was stunningly beautiful. The words, the almost calligraphic expression of it in pain, the way the words flowed on the wall, and how they could be read like the lines were ripples on a creek flowing over smooth stones.

It also came with music in my mind. I didn't paint the notes of this music, though. Apparently, when anyone read it, the music was implicit in the poem. According to the dream's logic, this was the only music that fit the poem, and everyone who was musically inclined would hear the same music while they read it.

He read it silently while I watched him. I could tell that he was moved. At one point I quietly said, while he read the poem, that the music suggests itself, and he seemed to realize that as he read on. But he shook off the feeling on the last line of the chorus, which changed from 'in the heart of desire' to 'in the eyes of the lord.' 

He said that the rest of it had no religious context and that this line threw him out of the poem. And then he started to rant about Trump and people finding religion and how people outside the religion react badly to this sort of sermonizing, etc.

Wakeful-me thinks of the gorgeous song "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen as an immediate way to refute this thinking. The dream guy was so wrong on so many levels. I mean seriously. You don't have to be religious to love that song. In fact, many say that it's about sex. I wonder if that idea came from a Rolling Stone magazine article, or the artist himself (who was Jewish), and if this idea was more of a defense mechanism than the reality. And what would the meaning of 'the reality' matter anyway? It can be both. Embrace the power of 'and.' It can be a song about sex, and lovers coming together and/or breaking apart, and a criticism of casting every aspect of life in a context of religion, or a declaration that even 'profane' parts of life are, in many ways, religious. Maybe Cohen didn't want to be boxed in by religion while his soul wrote that gospel-inspired song, either because he was repulsed by the politics associated with religion, or because he thought he'd be judged. Or maybe he just didn't want the song to live in that box, as he'd written it to be something that was more, or both, or barely touching it.

The dream-me was non-plussed. I told him that I was pagan, and the lord in the poem was Death. 

It shattered the dream guy. He staggered away, overwhelmed, his attempt to pull my grief's expression down into the realm of the childish, unskilled, and deeply flawed thoroughly exposed for what it was–petty arrogance and an attempt to feel superior. He realized he was the one exposed as an imposter as a critic and expert.

Then I woke up.

I tried so hard to remember the poem. Almost as if the dream was on a loop, I had read and reread that poem, and it was absolutely consistent. As usual, even in the dream, it was a piece of a work, partial, but that partial poem/song, written by my grief, was stunning. I thought I had that piece memorized, thanks to repeatedly reading it during the dream, but it began to melt away, like frost exposed to a dawning light. I couldn't hold onto it. Except the two lines that I wrote above.

But I had the music. 

So, frantically, I printed out some sheet music, and got the melody down on paper, as well as the two lines of poetry and the unusual way they interact with the music. I'm hoping that, later on, the bits around the melody will remain obvious to me, so that I can finish it. Honestly, the music is going to sit in the real world the same way that the fictionalized Salieri's music compared to Mozart's in the movie and (again, fictionalized) plays written about their relationship.

Maybe it will end up in the second book in the True Dawn series I'm working on. (The first book is almost ready to publish!) I know exactly where it will go. And, if I can put the music together properly, I may include it after the cast of characters and glossary.