Without dreams, where would we be, really? They are all we have sometimes to keep us going.
"I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
Yeats
Because my story, The Secret Remedy Book, ends with Auntie Zep tucking Lolly into bed, it was very natural to have the seventh remedy be all about dreams. I had already made a card called "Sweet Dreams." It is a bed floating in the starry heavens, with a puffed-up pillow, a plaid wool blanket with a fringe, and a cotton ruffle with little eyelets peeking out from beneath the comforter.
In the secret remedy scrapbook, I put the "Sweet Dreams" card on the left-hand side of the seventh remedy spread, with a sprinkling of star-stickers to frame it.
The card on the right is a Marcel Schurman holiday card. The artist is Nancy Taliaferro Faulkner. I love the be-ribboned earth, and also the very atypical view of our topograghy. It is good for children, and adults, to know that there are many versions of the halves of our planet besides the "western" and "eastern" halves.
Well, I got our very old globe down, dusted it off, and compared it to the card. I think that top land mass is Africa, but I couldn't quite identify the bottom land mass. Artistic license, then! I'm all for it, especially if it makes me get an old globe down and roll it around, wondering which way is right-side-up, which way is upside-down . . .
Especially if it makes me think about all my dreams, my old flower-child dreams, my newer "older but wiser" dreams.
Of course, the seventh remedy isn't about nighttime dreams. It's about daytime dreams. And not just any kind of daytime dream. My secret remedy story is for children, but I'm always writing for the grown-up child, too, and I do really want children of all ages to be able to dream about "doing great things." Not just any old thing but something well and truly worth doing. Something that might even be bigger than just one person can do alone.
Something like Peace On Earth.
I'm always reaching for the stars and then having to back peddle to something a little more within my reach. I don't know where my grandiose conceptions of what I think I can do came from.
It's so easy to sit in one's armchair and dream of all the great things that one could be doing ~ I do it myself all the time.
So I had to add the all important caveat in order to make this last remedy something that really can be done: "You must think of one small great thing you can do tomorrow." Note: It really needs to say "today" to give it a sense of immediacy, but in my story it's nighttime now and so it has to say "tomorrow."
I can't tell you how many times I changed this one little sentence from "one small great thing" to "one small thing" to "one small great thing," back and forth. Kept taking that one word "great" out and then putting it back in again.
It took a painting like this one above to make me keep the word "great" in, because how can a great painting be great if each tiny dab of paint along the way isn't of the exact same quality? And then I began to see how other steps along the way were of the same importance: getting out of bed, finding the palette and the paintbrushes, mixing the paints, standing back and just staring ~ for hours if need be.
This painting is titled "The Flying" by Anchise Picchi, 1911. It has a dream-like quality, don't you think? I love how those geese and the grasses drift in and out of the canvas, just the way in which the sleeper sometimes drifts in and out of dreams. And few dreams have captured the imagination of humankind more than that of flying.
I live with an aeronaut who flies a hot-air balloon on the weekends and who sometimes flies in his dreams at night, too. His flying dreams are without his balloon ~ he's flying on his own. I've never ~ yet ~ had a flying dream. Have you? I keep hoping to have one.
This document above is the 1786 description of the historic Montgolfier Brothers' 1783 balloon flight. It includes the illustration of the balloon with engineering proportions and description. Here is a whole different kind of creative process that depends upon one small great thing after another in order to end up with one monumentally great historic event whose ramifications still go on and on, from Kitty Hawk to the lunar landing to little robot rovers on Mars with names like "Spirit" and "Opportunity."
While I was teaching, I was also trying to illustrate what would become my first children's picture book. I was so tired at night that some nights all I could do was get out the paper, the scissors, the fabric. But then the next night I might make a tracing, the next night cut out the paisley dress, and by the end of a week I might have one illustration pieced and patched together into a very rough draft.
Eventually, I sold the text to this story but not my illustrations. Still, I've always felt that maybe the artwork gave my story a little edge that it wouldn't have had otherwise. If I have time enough in my life, I'd like to work on becoming more of an artist someday, but I might love words too much to make the time for it. Not that I couldn't try to do both.
But I've learned, or let's say I'm still learning, that whatever it is a person embarks upon, a letter to a friend, a new recipe for peach cobbler, an embroidery for an apron, a flying machine, it has be be done one small great step at a time.
And I do forget this ~ a lot.
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is one of the best books I know of for helping people to get in touch with their creative souls so we can start doing and keep on doing whatever it is that we were born on this earth to do.
It's the kind of book that can help people find the way to make their dreams come true, one step at a time.
I do hope that your dreams are coming true for you!
And now we have come to the end of the seventh, the last remedy. It isn't quite the end of the secret remedy scrapbook, however. I'll try to explain that to you this week, I hope.
Suddenly they heard the soft, trembling hoot of an owl
in the darkness outside the window.
. . .
Lolly was all sleepy and cozy and full of great thoughts.
She was busy dreaming of tomorrow.
.
