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Baggage DreamsAugust 03, 2007 I only remember the occasional snatches of my dreams, and I've never made consistent efforts to remember more -- keeping a journal and a pen at my bedside, for instance. My waking imagery gives me plenty to work with, insights to explore, visuals to wander in, characters carrying on intense conversations whose beginnings I missed. When a dream snatch survives waking, I just add it to the cauldron. So this morning I woke under more covers than I needed (it's hot, it's humid), feeling anxious: How was I going to stuff all those books into my suitcase? I seemed to be at WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention I used to attend regularly; some of the books were piled on a table at which I'd been sitting for a panel discussion, and the only other person in the dream was a WisCon person. The books were weighty tomes, the size and shape of encyclopedia volumes, not at all like the trade and mass-market paperbacks that dominate my shelves, or that I'd be likely to pick up in a con's huckster room. I've been copyediting a book about the Bill of Rights, however, and am currently slogging through the endnotes -- legal case citations out the wazoo. Maybe they were law books. But why would I be packing law books into my suitcase? And at WisCon? I know better than to get hung up on the details. Instead I recognized at once that this was a baggage dream: Heads up! Pay attention! This is important! When I still lived in D.C., I had a series of baggage dreams. I'd be riding a city bus along Constitution Ave. or a similarly straight and several-lane road. The bus would pull over to the curb, and up ahead I'd see another bus that I desperately had to catch. But I had so much luggage (on a city bus, mind you) that I knew I'd never gather it up in time to catch the other bus. Sometimes my father was on the bus I needed to get off. In another series I had to transfer from one train to another that was already in the station. In the center of a courtyard was a huge trunk that I needed to take with me, but without three or four people and some wheeled conveyance I couldn't move it, and there was no help in sight. I'd wake up frantic. Eventually both the bus dreams and the train dreams resolved. I left my luggage on the bus. I opened the trunk, took what I needed, and ran for the train. The dreams resolved, but the theme keeps coming back, in myriad guises that I often don't recognize at first. The underlying lesson is Don't hold yourself back. Carrying too much baggage is one pretty reliable way to hold myself back; being landless on Martha's Vineyard is a pretty good way to avoid accumulating too much stuff. But the ingenious mind can come up with plenty of alternatives, and my mind is plenty ingenious. The first round of baggage dreams started around the time it was beginning to dawn on me that for years I'd been using food to damp down my energies whenever they threatened to get some momentum going -- and that my mother had used alcohol for much the same purpose. You don't think that was scary? After I finished The Mud of the Place I felt sludgy for months and what eventually came to me (thanks in significant measure to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way) was that I was biking uphill with the brakes on. So I take baggage dreams seriously. When I wake up frantic because I can't stuff all those big books in my suitcase, and if I can't stuff the books in the suitcase then I can't get to wherever I want to go -- I pay attention. Thing is, I've known for a couple of months now that my current situation is unsustainable. I need to get Mud of the Place out there, but I'm making no headway toward making that happen, either by sending out proposals or by self-publishing. Squatters' Speakeasy is doing everything it can to get and keep my attention, but I keep brushing it off with "Not now, I'm too tired." This isn't too surprising: I've got, in effect, a full-time job, a part-time job, and an occasional job, and I'm trying to sell one novel and write the next in my spare time? According to the clock, I've got two, maybe even three, hours a day that aren't already committed, but the clock doesn't tell the whole story because, one, the hours are usually scattered in pieces through the day, and two, I'm too tired to take advantage of them. This time it's not hard to identify the books I can't stuff in my suitcase, the luggage I can't drag to the front of the bus, the trunk I can't get on the train. About 20 hours of my every week and nearly $6,000 of my income goes toward horse-keeping. I'm not kidding when I say that without Allie I never would have finished Mud of the Place. But I'm shelling out more money and more hours than I was then, and the drain drain drain is making the writing impossible. And my life is about the writing, not the riding. So is it time to get out of horses altogether? I considered it -- for about 10 seconds. Don't think so. Allie is a great horse, and not one that could be easily replaced. And being around horses does help me write -- what doesn't help is the huge outlay of money and time, and the certain knowledge that I'm making no progress toward where I'm supposed to go. In one of those old baggage dreams, the solution wasn't either to abandon the whole trunk or to stay behind with it: it was to sort through the contents, take what I needed, and move on. So I've started putting out the word that I'm looking for the right person to half-lease Allie (meaning they get half the riding time in exchange for half the care and expense). Damned if I know where this will lead, or whether the right person will appear with the right deal. What I do know is that Mud and Squatters have let out a long sigh of relief: We thought you'd given up on us. No way. NO WAY.
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