Mason Jars for Wild Thoughts
In the dreary, muddled soup of morning dreams, eyes flutter and shake with waking, and in the mind’s eye, hands reach feebly for ideas as loose and meaningless in their makeup as the dreams they come from.
In the morning, I wake myself. I tell myself to get up right then and there and write what just popped into my brain or I will regret it later because, more likely than not, I will forget it later. And, unfortunately, “later” can consist of just a few fleeting seconds, the greatest of ideas leaving you in less time than it takes to blink the sleep out of your eyes. But I can hardly stay angry at my sleepy brain for this carless disposal of thoughts, making me scramble for a pen and a notebook before they leave me. I know myself to be a hoarder of beautiful things, and that this is simply the nature of dreams, to be fleeting so you strive harder to capture them. Unlike day thoughts which are slow in their coming and can be accepted or rejected as the conscious mind wishes, or night thoughts which tingle the brain and question the very fabric of reality, dreams dare you and challenge you to accept or make sense of that which cannot be accepted as anything with meaning or purpose.
Dreams are quick, the fragments of stories and people and things, and sights and smells and beautiful things and terrible things, cold nights, bright starts, blue suns, pink sand and desert oceans. The intensity of each idea, each potential narrative is so difficult to describe to the waking world without sounding like I have lost all footing in reality. But, of course, I do this. When I get up and write down what my mind has offered, and the insanity become ink to paper, I lose myself entirely to emotion, to an explosion of worlds so blissfully and torturously private and all my own.
Blissfully, because you can never truly understand their beauty or charm as I do if I tried to make you see, and for that reason, would rather have them to myself anyway.
And torturously, because I so wish to show everyone, even those who do not deem themselves to be particularly imaginative. Yet the only things I have are words. All I have are things of contradiction, things that depict worlds in such depth that they move the soul to tears, and things that can never come close to the colors of God and life.
But, once the dreams have been caught and placed within the confines of a spine and two covers, how do we explain to others, or even ourselves, where they have come from? And, for that matter, where do any ideas come from? Not merely the ones that inspire and ignite those reading into action, but those that come to us during all times of life, the "voices" or inner narrators of the mind.
To say that they simply exist because they simply do isn't a good enough answer for me. I want to know where all ideas, not just the elusive dreams and nightmares, come from. Why do people, characters, places and things come to us, sometimes in such detail that we form an unbreakable bond with that which is not deemed "real" by the gray jacketed businessmen and intellectuals of all things non-fantastical. I find that I am put off by the question of the their origins. Why should we grow so close, so aggravated,so curious, so saddened or fearful of things which are not supposed to affect us because they lack a physical form? Do they really lack form if they are born and live within a body that hold them?I don’t know if anyone has ever been able to answer this question, if questioned at all.
Some would say “God brought them to me”, and to this, I would agree. But, it is also true that many ideas come from what we see and what we already know, most creations simply an adaption of what already exists. But what of the originals? The striking, blinding brilliance of the first thoughts, the ancestor narratives, the firstborns of characters. Where do these come from? Dark places in space that somehow connect directly to all thinking creatures? Quiet places in all dimensions, tucked into small spaced and swept up through the air like dust that will float through our mass and into our consciousness?
Perhaps. I am an open-minded person and believe almost anything can be possible or happen in this world. It would be foolish to walk around thinking one has all the answers to everything. Certainly. Especially humans. We ourselves don’t understand nearly as much as we say we do, and we barely understand each other, and to that end, neither do we ever understand all of who we are.
I personally tend to think of ideas as their own people, with their own thoughts and feelings and places of origin. Most of them, the helpful ones or the ones that challenge me in healthy ways, I love. Perhaps they are people, souls that drift around through the world, influencing those who still walk the Earth, just to have a taste being alive again. Some would harm, or try to, others only know fear so that's all they can offer, and others would wish to see us do well, to see us flourish and grown and smile with the awesomeness of inspirations. Yet, these are only suggestions.
I'm not sure I'll ever know.
But, the point of this article isn't to answer the question. After all, we all have our own thoughts and our own minds that these thoughts visit. You may try to figure out for yourself whether or not these ideas have a purpose, origin or meaning. You can decide for yourself whether you are truly in control of them, if you can manipulate what is offered or if you are simply being guided the whole way through the process of creation.
As for myself, I am some reading to do. Or, in other words, I have more people to let into my head. I'd suggest you do the same. They give you great ideas.
