My nap included a spectacular explosion of what felt like a fountain of creativity. I’m working with TWR’s Sleep of Clear Light course, with a mantra of “dissolve into the light”. As I was falling asleep I thought of Eve’s latest post where her imaginary dialog with Stan the dog shifted to where he was the main speaker. I thought about how she always writes dialog and that I would like to start writing dialog. The word Dialog triggered the fact that I have a huge fat binder called Dialog Dimension. That triggered a gusher of ideas that will be hard to capture at this leisurely pace. I’ll drop the need for complete sentences temporarily.
The first thought is who shall be my imaginary friend to dialog with?
I started running through the many people I dialogued with in the journals, some dead, some alive.
The first one I really visualized was Lou Ray. Recently deceased, an imaginary dialog is very appropriate, very natural, spontaneous.
Dialoguing with somebody recently passed wipes out the artificial boundaries between the living and no longer here, awake vs. dream.
As the boundaries melt I keep chanting “Dissolve into the light”.
Dialoguing freely with people across these boundaries produces a sense of liberation and an irrepressible laughter starts bubbling up.
In this part there’s a rich flow of people from all parts of my life, individually and in groups, with brief testing of how imagined dialog would work with each. Also a few public figures from the past. Abe Lincoln from the cross-genre vampire novel makes a very brief appearance.
All the people and places in Empty Poetry as non-fiction so far, could potentially be in imaginary dialog in any combination.
Some of the periods I’ve felt blocks about writing about may be ripe for a semi-fictionalized approach.
Dialog with Roshi about the emerging eco future and which elements to encourage
Dialoguing with various authors I’m reading
Whole groups of people to engage in dialog with – teacher librarians, zennies, etc.
Dancing with my caregivers, all 6 or 7 of us
Toward the end I was getting so giddy from tapping back into the mantra “Dissolve into the light” that the simple three word phrase “ light and shadow” came up. That brought me a little closer to earth, and immensely richened the conversation. I thought of Jung’s extended exercise in active imagination, and how he expanded the meaning of the word shadow.
I got up. It was time for Harry to leave.
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