The Creative Dream & its Torment
Let's look at what daydreams are and why they hurt us -- and where we can start to let them guide us on our longest adventure.
From the video of this essay, which you can watch here.
You want a more creative life? I wake up, and it torments me, how beautiful my dream life is. Rolling over, I open my social media, dazzled and yet drained, flicking through the lives of the creatives I've selected for myself. You might also want more from every part of your life right now, but we are already here. At least we've woken up, on our longest adventure.
The specific pain of those artists living in the life you long for is the focus of your breakfast, if you even eat it. You live between the press releases of your favourite musicians and filmmakers. Isn't this the life?
But what you were doing in that dream – be it reading your poems in a candlelit pub to a small, grinning audience, or slashing guitar strings at Wembley, or even potting geraniums along the wall of a rustic garden, we can call God's work. The difference and dissonance between your real life and that is enough pain to put someone into A&E and rehab and back, disillusioned and depressed.
As an artist from London, I am currently trying to nurture a community of creatives because for me mental health and the crisis of imagination in the modern world are terrifying and real. We are rich but painfully unequal, and our imaginations as much as our financial situations, are impoverished. For me, the answer is the creative life. I want to be a mentor, including for myself, and this is my commitment to that – to grow and deepen a creative practice together.
What are dreams then? Neuroscience tells us that night-dreams and daydreams come from the Default Mode Network of the brain, the DMN, known as the imaginative mind. It's the fields of the brain that activate when we're both safe and not doing anything else. When there's a lack of external stimuli, the brain turns in – how do we feel? how are our friends these days? when did I last eat a cornish pasty? when's our next proper adventure holiday? what if our clothes picked our outfits for us? what if…?
What if – two omnipotent words. Words that are worth being bored for, worth throwing away your phone for, worth running away from any gossipy drama, worth protecting. Shelter and nurture your daydreams. What if…?
Dreams are only half of creativity, the other half is in the doing. Full creativity is realising dreams. The etymology from res (Latin for stuff, for matter). We make our dreams real by making them res. We turn our dreams into the stuff of the world. Such stuff as dreams are made on, Shakespeare wrote. And what stuff? Actors, props, costumes, the Great Globe itself, the physical matter of dream-making, a dream-workshop.
Grounding your dreams in this reality is no compromise, because your reality is your pure fingerprint-snowflake uniqueness. Darwin’s idea of adaptation or speciation explains why no mammal ever evolved that was some generalised, amorphous animal. We are all highly specialised. This is what differentiates you from those around you, and may even alienate both them or you. It also differentiates you from your idols, role models, mentors. I grew up wanting to be Bob Dylan, now I know those doors that opened up for him would never be the same for me. The hatches and avenues through the complex thickets of his life, Minnesota winters, singing to Gurthie in Brooklyn State Hospital, Greenwich Village into the Civil Rights movement into the Never Ending tour – someone rose to that hero's journey and the way is shut. But who am I? Where I am I going? That’s my own adventure.
To be unique you have to follow your tao, – that road is through (not out of) your reality. A path into art that comes out of your life, is as real as it is. Here there are no cliches (except knowing ones, subverted with a wink). No shortcuts, no idealised fakeness, nothing scrubbed out or idealised. Your life and work need the disillusionment, they need you to start from nothing because it's not nothing! Your nothing is a starting point (a midpoint, a realisation) of such rich lived-in-ness that anyone visiting you from the outside would be overwhelmed. Your auntie wasn't she fun? That joke someone told on the beach, and the sand that still lives under the floor covers of the family car. The regretted career. The minutiae of all of that which is you. That's it, this is it. Here we are.
In fact I can’t stand reading books or watching films, where the author doesn’t know if characters do the washing up. Doing the washing up saves your life, and saves your characters from unreality. Just don’t make them martyrs over it either.
Lean on the quote (which I think is from Chekhov), to be better artist, be a better person. To embrace radical acceptance, also known as the artist’s view, you will laugh at how odd the Universe’s plan is. Somehow we had to go from the nucleosynthesis of Helium a few minutes after the Big Bang, through the Ice Ages on earth, the steady cultivation of plants, animals, humans, to the invention of apples, tractors, No Entry signs and the formation of the Beatles, not to mention their tribute acts and the unknowable individuality of every open mic night in every continent every night of the week around the world. From this universalising perspective, the art teacher helping a young girl mix paints and a grandad planting roses have as much a role in the Wide Scheme of things as the Dalaï Lama and the head of the World Bank.
Feel the wonder of how specific your path is – for me when I'm writing it's finding the metaphor or analogy like a pretty stone on a beach, that no one else has taken, that I'll keep for a few years on its eternal geological journey. I'm also a publisher, and when I'm printing, the journey comes down to picking out the four correct pieces of lead to hold type into a form, or it'll all fall apart (or paying council tax, or of course washing up three times a day…). Think about the difference on a hike between a rough idea of your destination (South East) and the actual reality of footpaths, road crossings, decisions to go left or right around this wood. There are no right answers, only different views.
From this view – this deep breath, step-back-view – there’s no wealth or status to chase, no perfectionism, and that is creativity. Letting the universe just flow. Flow with the go. We’re that same Hydrogen and Helium as 13bn years ago, and in 13bn more we’ll be something else. It's not to say we shouldn't be angry at the state of things – in fact the artist's view makes you more angry over injustice, more aware of your own complicity and investment in the world's wrongs. But you also can't blame any of the actors. Humans are fallen angels: we can be omniscient without being omnipotent or benevolent. Even omniscience is frail, the universe gave us awareness, not all-knowledge; perspective not wisdom.
So the end isn't status or success, the end of your river is the ocean – from the specific back to the universal. From the self back to the Self (capital S). We are all universe. That's why don't flee your dreams or your reality. These are your materials – your Self includes the washing up. All artists are flops, all art imperfect. Look up anyone you respect and you'll find those few points of success and the years and years of creative living (which some might call failure, but most artists call life).
Do the doable. March on, find the flow, do it for the plot, start where you are, flow with the go.
Okay so I wanted to end with what I promised. We’ll both use this chance to deepen our creative practice. For me today I feel like doing a poem (more words!) so feel free to watch and maybe get some inspiration, or use these few minutes to sketch something or go off and do something else. Let that Imaginative Mind, the Default Mode Network, run its course and watch the river flow. The tide came in with all its heady stimulation, and it recedes. Let's consider what it left.
Here is a poem I wrote at the end of this practice, which you can watch at the link here.
Torment
Will J. Wood
Leave me alone — how dare you
Dare me to set me adrift
To the sunburn and sea-scratch of rescue
Where my siren call is a gift.
It’s (not) fair — privilege’s poverty
That enough is too much enough
That holy, Tenge-less nomads
Gorge on the Milky Way’s fluff.
Who speaks this and where from?
The magma plumes heating the spring
The wordless, speech-less truth-teller
In silence the chorus will sing.
You’ll drown with me in giddy torment
My company for the descent.
If there's any chance you're inspired too – pls send me your art / thoughts / writing at heyseedlings@gmail.com
❤️ 🌱