Dreaming of being me
Photo credit: Anne Haarmark Møllmann
On the face of it, it was a lovely dream. I was playing hide-and-seek with my niece. At some point, I came upon an old chest filled with blankets and pillows. Perfect. It was easy to open and shut, soft to lie in, and big enough that my niece could crawl in, lay flat, and still have room to spare. Except she said no, I’m not getting in there. We had a bit of back-and-forth, but she was adamant, and we needed to hide. So I crawled into the chest myself, laid down, and closed it. Throughout my dream, I carried this chest with me on the outside, so that it provided both warmth and sound insulation. Everything was slightly muted and that felt at the very least safe.
I have a lazy subconscious. When I feel I am letting myself down, I might dream of standing trial without a lawyer. When I feel excluded, I might dream of peering into a brightly lit ballroom through a locked window. Let’s just say, my dreams require no deep interpretative powers to be understood: they are pretty self-explanatory.
For some time, I have been thinking about the creative youth I left behind: the person who drew and made weird things out of clay, but mostly, the person who wrote. I wrote a lot as a child and young adult. Stories, fiction, poems. I published poems in Danish literary magazines. I won prizes for my short stories at school. And even setting those accolades aside, creative writing was important to me. I thought of myself as a writer, in the way that one of my favourite poets, Marge Piercy, talks about writers: the real writer is one who really writes.
And of course it’s not like I don’t write anymore: I am doing it right now. But at some point I stopped writing the things that truly make my heart soar. Instead, I wrote reports on human rights violations and letters of advocacy and legal briefs and fundraising proposals and opeds and strategies for change. I wrote prolifically. I even, within the logic of each kind of writing, wrote successfully. All of those things mattered, matter still, also to me. But they were written with my head.
This blog, these musings, are my first foray into writing with my full self again. And what my dream is telling me is that they are not enough. There is more creativity to step into, whenever I am ready to get out of the chest and be with the children again.
That’s what I eventually did in my dream: at some point towards the end of it, a slightly older child pointed at me and asked why I was schlepping around a chest. Only then did I look down and notice it was still there. I woke up as I was slowing cracking open the lid.
