I Had a Dream

Dreams and writing, as discussed on Tablet.

From the story...

The history of genius—and let’s face it, I am a genius—is a long and storied one. Some of the most beloved stories are of seemingly divine revelation: ideas, plots, concepts, and music that came to one genius or another in his dreams. That is because unlike you, we geniuses have a deep, underground, tumultuous river of thought and ideas, so deep, in fact, that only our subconscious will ever dare to plumb its murky, brilliant depths. “In our dreams the fetters of civilizations are loosened,” wrote Havelock Ellis, who was no slouch himself.

Paul McCartney, who might be a genius but definitely isn’t really a genius-genius, claimed that the song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. Handel, who was a genius-genius, said the last movement of his Messiah arrived in the form of a dream, and Wagner, also a genius-genius, dreamt the opera Tristan and Isolde. Robert Louis Stevenson (genius), Poe (crazy genius), Charlotte Brontë (genius) and D.H. Lawrence (genius-genius) all claimed that dreams fueled the inspiration for their work. Goethe (genius-genius) said he was guided by his dreams, as was Samuel Taylor Coleridge—the story goes that he dreamt the poem “Kubla Khan,” sat up to write it down, and was interrupted by a knock on the door. When he attempted to finish transcribing it, it was gone. The poem remained unfinished.

Two years ago, roughly speaking, I had a dream.