Thursday morning early, I dreamed I held and read the metafiction of Earthsea.
Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels, starting with A Wizard of Earthsea, are among my very favorites. (In the "young boy learns to become powerful magician category, forget Harry Potter or Timothy Hunter, the best story is that of Ged, called Sparrowhawk.) Somehow they popped into my dreamtime, and I found myself holding a book that does not exist, a thick tome (green cover with gold lettering) in which Le Guin had supposedly written about the history (personal and political and cultural), food, technology, sketches of clothing and armor and flora and fauna of that world... the Simarillion on steroids times two made better and actually interesting. Its very existence filled my dream with joy.
And I could read it! Even though the content evaporated with the morning dew (I am terrible at remembering dreams, and would have forgotten even this little bit had I not stumbled over to the computer and made some notes), I know I could read it and it was sensible. This is rare; in dreams I am usually dyslexic.
The penultimate book (so far?) in the series, Tales from Earthsea, does end with a sort of fictional extended encyclopedia entry about the realm. But I don't know if it evolved out of any sort of notes Le Guin made during the writing process or was created entirely fresh for that book. And my dream book was about twenty times that size.
So why'd the back of my brain throw this up over the rail? Maybe because I'm back to work, however slowly and hesitantly, on the novel I started last fall during NaNoWriMo (tentatively titled Bamboo Jake). And I've been thinking of writing some sort of supporting documentation, external notes, a bit on the main characters' factual history and archetypical resonances, a brief essay on how the plot does or doesn't match Campbell's "hero's journey", etc. I find myself more and more in agreement with the idea that I can't know what I think about something until I try to write an essay about it, so perhaps that applies event to the characters and plot of this novel. (Especially since the idea for this novel came as an alternative to exploring ideas about masculinity in a book-length essay.) Of course those notes won't be anything as majestic as what I dreamed, but it's that how dreams work, communicating in huge and majestic images to seize our attention?
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