Last Night

Last night I dreamed I wrote 3,850 words in a sitting. This may seem like nothing...but to stay on schedule for NANOWRIMO you have to write 1,667 words a day. What was remarkable about the number was not that it was so many words--it was that it was effortless. In my dream I was lost in the zone. The world dropped away and I was writing. When I looked down at the little number counter on my mac I was SHOCKED to see that number.

All of this is reminiscent of my Shamanic Journey this summer. In my travels to the underworld (no, this is not fiction, or a lost, experimental chapter of my book) I went down and met my power animal--a big she-bear. I had met her before and there she was again. This time she held my gaze--she kept telling me to look into her eyes. And she told me, "This is what it will feel like to write the way you want to write." My attention kept wandering. I kept looking up at these jagged mountain peaks, at the moon, at the stars, trying to figure out where I was, what I was doing, struggling to get my bearings, and she kept pulling me back, telling me to stop getting distracted. To look in her eyes and feel what it was like to drop into the writing zone.

Our subconscious can be so literal! I DO get so distracted. I AM always trying to figure out where I am and what I am doing. But she just kept trying to train me, to build up my powers of concentration, pulling me back to that feeling of being in the zone. She was letting me know; "This is what it will feel like. This is how it should feel. It will be effortless once you drop in, but you need to discipline your mind and get there."

Well, in my dream I was there. And that was cool.

Do you ever have dreams like that? Teaching you a feeling that you then have to seek out in real life?