So here's something kind of new. Last night I was trying to go to sleep, and a poem started transmitting into my head. It was like when my elderly next door neighbor falls asleep watching those episodes of Sex and the City that they put on regular cable, and leaves her living room window open with the volume cranked way up.I was trying to be good and go to bed on time, but as soon as I started drifting off it was there. Just lines of it. I'd had a few transmissions earlier in the day, but I figured they'd stop once it was bedtime.
I didn't want to get out of bed, since that would make me hyper. I have cold hardwood floors. I didn't want to type it into my blackberry, but it was there next to my bed, so I did it. I typed a couple of lines into the note pad, and discovered that some other (mysterious) time I'd typed a few other lines there, too.
Now: to get the time to finish the transmission. I wish it would start up again soon. It was a bit like the migraine with aura I had last week, only a lot more enjoyable.
4 comments:
"a bit like the migraine with aura" - what a line... I love it!
i've had those ideas that seem as if they can only inhabit you in bed or any given place. i like to try to remember where i was when i wrote a particular poem or other work. maybe, even i can get back to where i was, i can write such work again.
I keep the notebooks I write poems in next to me all the time. (Well, almost -- they're paper notebooks, and it doesn't work too well to take them in the shower, but pretty much everywhere else.) When I go to sleep at night they sit next to my bed. Handy to have there when the transmissions start...
There's that kind of spontaneous flow of images, almost like a spontaneous movie (though it feels more three dimensional, like you're in the movie), that happens as you're drifting off to sleep. "Hypnogogic" imagery, I think is the name for it. I've found that when I can get that to happen as I'm falling asleep, I tend to dream more vividly, and also poems seem to come to the surface more readily when I'm awake.
Not pretending to know what that's about, it's a mystery, but seems to work.
Well, we're waiting.....;-) Sounds a bit like Coleridge's account of the writing of Kubla Khan. So even a fragment will be appreciated.
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