Dreaming Inside a Box

The box is a bad fit

I had a dream recently. It was a semi-lucid dream in which I could change things at will and… sort of… knew I was dreaming. I was wealthy and had someone to drive me from point A to point B. I wasn’t young [but then I’m enjoying being 58 a lot more than I enjoyed being 28. YMMV] but I was respected for… some job I performed, I wasn’t sure what.

Something began to bother me. I knew something was wrong [all very vague], but realized that I could change things. Oh! I could have wings and fly! If I could do that, I could find the source of the problem for everyone, and fix it.

I grew my wings. It was familiar. I dream about flying a lot. The landscapes over which I soared were amazing, surreal in their beauty, and yet there was a nagging sense of wrongness. And there it was. I could see a corner in the sky where the world bent and became a flat wall.

I was in a box.

I started to panic and flew away, looking for more of the same. repeat pattern: Stunning surreal ocean with tall, twisting towers of orange glass, and then… a wall.

I collapsed on the shore and examined my precious wings. I couldn’t feel them the way I could feel an arm or a leg. They weren’t real. Then I realized that wings were better in my imagination.

Maybe they aren’t the only thing.

I’m a writer. I write fantasy fiction under a pen name. I get to imagine what it would be like to be a satyr or a centaur. How would they move? What would they eat? How would they fight or breed? What’s it like to BE them? I also write male characters.

It’s much more difficult to write the opposite sex than it is to write about an imaginary creature. There are no mistakes when you’re making up a species but male humans exist and it’s wildly unfair to write about them as if they were women. Writers who do this badly aren’t doing their readers any favors. When women write men as if they are women, women don’t really know what men think, but believe they do. [I give you many romance novels.] The same goes for men writing women.

But however much time I imagine being a satyr, or a centaur, or a man, I can’t become any of these things. One of the science fiction authors I used to read was John Varley. Imagine a world in which humans could transfer their consciousness into a new body at will, or shape the body they had so it could function in any environment. One of his characters had changed their body so much that they could only live in outer space, and could no longer survive or even move in a gravity well.

Reading, science fiction and fantasy can leave one quite open-minded about accepting the new and strange. The mistake is thinking that we can become the new and strange without profound consequences.

Certainly, we don’t have the technology to graft wings onto a human body let alone have them work as intended. Nor do we have the technology to change a man into a woman or a woman into a man, no matter that some people have been led to believe to the contrary.

In my dream, I realized that my imagined wings were not nearly what I had hoped. And in my life, I realized that reading a lot of fantasy kept me from living in my real life. The desire to escape has a natural consequence; I lacked the skills to deal with life. We don’t gain those skills unless we actually step into our lives and work - hard - to gain them.

Now, instead of stepping into other people’s creative worlds. I craft my own. But I don’t live in them.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, and the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.