Writing The Dream City
Writing The Dream City
Keynote for Philippine International Literary Festival at Ayala Museum
November 15, 2013
By Tony Perez
Good morning, everyone. This is the first time I’ve been invited to do a short keynote, and I’m very honored. Thank you for having me. This is also the first time I’m addressing colleagues after three years of conducting workshops for underserved audiences in different regions of the country: religious minorities, the underprivileged, the disabled, prison inmates, gang leaders, drug rehab residents, and children in conflict with the law. There are many promising writers among them. Given further guidance, they can all be practitioners like you. I wish they could be here with you today at “Text and the City”, the Ayala Museum leg of the Philippine International Literary Festival. This will be an exciting day for everyone, with internationally-known author Krys Lee and the Filipino writers here who produce not only short and long fiction but also write for comic books, graphic novels, and independent films.
My message is titled “Writing The Dream City”. I will give it in five, two-minute corollaries.
Number One: We write because we dream.
We write because we dream, and by dreaming I don’t mean being in the waking state and consciously wishing for something, or structuring a project, or planning a future. I mean dreaming while we are sleeping.
Other people often see us sitting and staring into space or quietly contemplating something. From their point of view, we are doing nothing. They don’t see that while seeming to be sitting around, we are actually writing while we are thinking. We develop characters and plots in our mind until we feel we’ve gotten them right, so that, by the time we actually encode everything, the work just flows—onto sheets of paper or onto a laptop screen. If we can write while we are thinking, it then follows that we can write while we are dreaming. In both cases, creative writing is accomplished in the subconscious, that state that bridges the conscious mind with the unconscious mind.
In much of the earliest literature available to us, including scripture, dreams are metaphorical stories relayed to the dreamer by the higher consciousness. The Hebrews listened to their dreams. They were some of the first dream interpreters. Dreams became material for decision-making in waging war, taking a spouse, moving tents, and migrating. When people today say that they cannot remember their dreams, it is because their strongest defense mechanism is repression. Since writers must frequently be in a state of vulnerability, they cannot afford to nurture such defense mechanisms. The successful writer, then, is a successful dreamer.
Number Two: Dreams are where our stories come from.
In countries where lower parts of houses go underground, the unconscious is likened to a basement or a cellar, but the unconscious is a lot more infinite than that. It is the source of all creativity. It is the open floor that extends to other open floors, the river of the unconscious that connects with the ocean of the collective unconscious.
I keep dream notebooks. I’ve been doing that since I was a child. I review those notebooks at the end of each year. I take special note of the locations of my dreams, houses I grew up in that look somewhat different, schools I went to that look somewhat different also, hotels and offices and beach resorts I’ve never seen in waking life. By studying those locations I was able to come up with my dream city, and I was able to draw a map of it. It frequently changes shape, but many of its elements are constant: the dream characters who live in the dream houses, my dream family, my dream friends. My dream city is comprised of the settings where my characters and stories happen.
I have come to believe that everyone has a dream city, and will master it if they would only bother to study it closely and draw a map of it. I have also come to believe that these cities interlock like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and that they ultimately form a globe of dream cities, and that the people whose dream cities are adjacent to ours are the people whom we love, and whom we spend most of our time with, whom we are obsessed with, whom we want to be with, if possible, forever.
We can travel from one dream city to another. We can be characters in other people’s dreams, as they can be characters in ours.
Dreams are why we understand what other people write.
Number Three: Our powers of observation should extend to our dreams.
We are trained to harness the five physical senses in exploring the world around us. In teaching the visually challenged, I discovered that they can see images in their mind, and that their dreams are filled with the same images that our dreams are filled with. That is because they also are connected to the collective unconscious of those who can see. We can train ourselves to harness our five senses in our dreams. There are writers and artists who have weak powers of observation. Their works hardly contain truth. We dream first, and then reflect on the dream after. In recalling the dream, we re-experience it in waking life. The powers of observation may be activated in one or in both cases: during the actual dreaming and during our reflection on the dream. In this manner we can revise and eventually author our dreams. We can give our dreams the endings that we like.
The objective of dreaming is to merge our dreaming life with our waking life. It is the same objective of writing when we take the reader on parallel planes of reality.
Your dream journal, then, is your writing journal. An idea that you write in your journal germinates both on paper and in your mind, and then it emerges as a creative work that you can share with others.
Number Four: When a dream recurs it is because the dreamer has not yet written it down or woven it into a story.
In our dreams, characters and stories jump out of their skins to be written down. For dreamers who are not writers, dreams recur when the dreamers do not taken the proper action required by the psyche. A dream that is not written recurs until you write it down. A dream can stop recurring only by two ways: when you have transformed it into a work of creative writing, or, if you refuse to transform it into a work of creative writing, when it moves out of your dream city and occurs in someone else’s dream city. In the latter case, it becomes someone else’s dream. If that someone else happens to be a writer, he or she will write that dream instead.
Number Five: Writing heals because dreams heal.
We succeed as writers whenever we write from our dreams. We fail whenever we write not from our own dreams, but from the dreams of others, when we write not from our own truth but from borrowed truth. Some even choose to write not from their dreams but from their nightmares.
We dream because our dreams heal us. We write our dreams in the same manner we write to remember different kinds of medicine, so that, after they heal us, we can use them to heal others too.
Again, we all welcome the visiting and Filipino writers to this gathering—published or unpublished, and, perhaps more importantly, those who are here as members of the audience who think they won’t make it but who love writing anyway. But, every writer makes it. All you have to do is dream. And then remember your dream. And then write it down.
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