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Dear Ed archive
October 2009
Dear Ed
Sometimes I dream I'm checking corrections on sets of pages. It takes all night and I wake up exhausted. What can I do?
Sleepless of Seaford
Dear Sleepless
Often dreams involve mentally practising what you've been doing during the day, allowing your brain to sort and store the memories. I've been having a few editing dreams myself, although in my case they're really aprés-editing dreams. Last week I dreamt I had flames coming out of my head as I calmly walked across a green field. I woke up thinking it had to be the best dream metaphor ever for 'burnout', and I wasn't too concerned until I looked in the mirror and discovered that my hair was singed.
The flaming-head dream came back to yesterday when I was reading book #418 from my unread books box, Douglas Coupland's Life After God. It's an impressive read, like a series of screengrabs from contemporary life compressed into miniature portraits, and it's only been waiting 12 months to be read. A character in Life After God says: 'You're always interpreting your dreams ... why not interpret your everyday life as though it were a dream, instead'.
Well, I thought, why not? What about giving less credence to dreams and letting reality get a foot in the door. The first morning of my new interpretable everyday life didn't start well. I had one of those mornings where I couldn't concentrate on work (and, much as I love editing, it is work). I couldn't settle down and I couldn't get started. I rearranged my files, sorted out my email in-box, put everything on the desktop where it belonged, then thought, 'This is unproductive. I should stop'. So I did. I went off and tackled the Age cryptic crossword, which normally does wonders for my unfocused mind.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with cryptic crosswords, but sometimes the answers flow and sometimes they don't. On this occasion, I couldn't even get one clue. I could not even get started. It wasn't until I reached 20 Down that there was a clue that spoke to me:
Edit badly, with hesitation and ennui (6).
Well, that was me to a T: the hesitation, the ennui, the editing badly. And I couldn't even solve that clue! I knew it had to start with 'ed' but that was it.
I got up early the next morning in a rush to fetch the Age and find out the answer. The answer to 20 Down was unedifying, to say the least:
editor
So in a day I had gone full circle, starting out as a bored and hesitant editor only to receive the answer: editor. It just didn't make a lot of sense. It even had fewer letters, making me somehow feel there was less of me on arrival than there had been on departure. But at least in my haste to get up and get the paper I had discarded the bored and hesitant aspects of yesterday's life.
The scary part about all of the above is that it's true: the flaming-head dream, Life After God, the crossword clues. (Well, I had to retouch reality here and there where the paint was chipped.) The only saving grace was the afterword in Life After God, which took me by surprise, hinting that the book had some kind of mental afterlife and that you, the reader, 'needed to wake up to yourself by viewing your life as you would your dreams'.
Make of that what you will.
Cheers
Ed