One of my all-time favorite comic strips is the classic Little Nemo in Slumberland, the 1910-era full-color fantasy by legendary artist Winsor McKay. In the series, Nemo enters a magical world of fantasy and imagination, only to be awakened in the comic strip’s final panel – as he realizes that his magical world was only the product of his nighttime slumbers. Below is an example of this well-drawn comic strip – in one of the most famous episodes, Nemo’s bed itself comes to life and walks through the city.
For many years, I’ve battled stress and depression, a one-two punch worse than three rounds with Manny Pacquiao. Sometimes I wake up – unable to return to bed, I’ll go to my home computer and write. William Kennedy once told me, “Every day, write one page. At the end of the year, you’ll have written a book.” So I write.
Writing, for me, has always been a successful therapy to battle depression and insomnia. It allows me an opportunity to explore my inner self, to try to strip away all the issues and drama that complicates my life. Whether it was in longhand in spiral notebooks, or typed into a computer’s word processing program – or, in the case of this very blog post, written from my BlackBerry 8703e cell phone while I’m still in bed – writing has always been an integral part of my existence and my sanity.
Sometimes, although it happens very infrequently, I can remember a fragment of my dream, and I try to write it down before it disappears from my conscious thought forever. The fragment might not make any sense, it might be disturbing or insightful. No matter what, I write it down anyway.
Maybe the fragments are the pieces of.a sonambulistic puzzle, a combination of etheria and wisteria on my mind’s subconscious. And the insomnia then becomes part of the creative process – a memory dump, if you will, from RAM memory and REM sleep into REM-embering.
Being a creative writer is not an easy task. And sometimes the writing process has more parts in it than a Revell model kit. But through it all, the process is always there, and one only needs to keep attentive to every nuance, every moment, every ounce of slumber before it all drifts away.
Chuck The Writer 