Similar Obstacles

Do you ever try and remember or write down your dreams when you wake up? You have just finished snowboarding down a mountain of vanilla pudding on your dresser, and before the talking penguin starts singing again, you suddenly recognize the scolding cries of your alarm and wake up. Before everything fades away like the afterimage of looking at a bright screen, you scramble for your phone or a napkin or whomever you slept with last night and begin retelling the story. 

Even at your best you never get all the details. You can leave the lights out or close your eyes at the risk of falling back asleep again, but the dream is so much less vivid than when you are experiencing it. All the little details seem to scatter to the shadows of the room and your waking imagination, too powerful with a full night's rest, starts to paint over the nonsense with its own version of logical creativity.

Your waking mind eliminates the unfathomable efficiently and deafly, like an overbearing parent attempting to forcing playtime on their child: "Well what if we made the background a green sky? There we go, and then blue trees. Trees can't be blue! And then instead of the amazing thoughts that you are about to lose forever, what if there was a stereo in the woods. Ha ha ha. Isn't that silly and creative? Isn't it? 

I sometimes try and fall back into the dream. It feels boundless and my mind moves at unfathomable speeds, fully in stride across a huge canvas rather than working inside of a wrinkled gum wrapper. I want to exist in that dreamful creative state for weeks. Not a coma or physics class, but just a state of thought where my mind fires on its own and lets me sit back and watch for a while. I get why people take acid. While tripping balls is a nice distraction, there's a futility of thought that comes paired with it which saps the ability to rationalize and build --  kind of like being given Legos to help you cope with being in a body cast.

I wonder if there is a correlation between being able to remember your dreams to being able to convey your thoughts more accurately and quickly. It seems likely as the process is similar or at least features similar obstacles. Thinking and dreaming is relatively easy -- at least for me. Communicating those ideas is where the challenge lies: a haphazard conversion at best. Thoughts form as a collection of images and concepts in your mind which only you are aware of or understand. To share them with others, we assign pre-determined descriptive words made up of phonetic symbols or sounds so that others can understand. But even then the other person only has a vague idea of what was in your mind, and can only confirm that by presenting their own phonetic symbols or sounds to confirm.

Awkward. But if there was a way to become more skilled, it seems as if one could be a better storyteller. This is not to assume that more speed and efficiency at conveying ideas would automatically make me a better writer. A story still requires other, similarly challenging skills. But at least I could convey what I am thinking with greater ease so I could focus more attention on those other areas. That way the greater portion of my time would be spent on better capturing the mind of my reader, rather than leaving them somewhere behind me, thinking about that penguin. "Let's make it a fun penguin. Is it green? Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't it?"