I’ve been up all night yet again, this time with terrible timing: I need to be awake in a few hours for a doctors appointment, but it’s rather difficult to wake up when one hasn’t been to sleep yet. It was yet another in a long line of nights where – despite feeling tired – I just couldn’t get to sleep in spite of the pain. This damn swelling, it never relents long enough just to let life pass by even for a moment of normality.

    But in a strange way, it’s quite good that I didn’t sleep, because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had a lovely little moment of clarity just now. And I do so love when those happen. 🙂

    To distract myself from the pain in the hope that I could fall asleep, I ended up watching ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’ If you haven’t seen it, you really need to – it’s brilliant and so spectacularly different from anything else that I wouldn’t even begin to know how to describe it without giving it away. But suffice it to say, a lot of it has to do with writing. More specifically, writing about life. Even more specifically, the minutiae of every day life.

    As the movie ended and I rolled over in bed, I was thinking happily about writing – the works of others, the books I’ve never finished, my own writing. As I stretched my body, my thoughts slipped for a moment to a funny lolcat I’d seen, I began to rustle myself from bed to wander to the bathroom to get ready to sleep. In that moment, inspiration struck.

    When I was 16 years old I had a dream. Those of you who know me should be fairly familiar with me and my outlandishly vivid dreams, and to those of you who are unfamiliar, well, I guess I’ll sound like a loony to you. But never mind.

    This dream I had started with a waking thought. I was taking a shower and I had gotten rather tired. I leaned my head against the cold white tile and spaced out for a moment. In that moment I contemplated what I must look like in that moment, looking so blank and emotionless, my face pressed against hard tile, the water spilling through my hair.

    I couldn’t get that mental image out of my head. As I brushed my teeth, pulled back my hair, slipped on my nightgown, and crawled into bed, there was that thought, lodged firmly in my brain. That picture of a woman, despondent and blank, seemingly asleep against the shower tiles.

    I fell asleep and the thought followed me to my dreams, sort of. The dream started with me busily getting dressed in a really elaborate red gown. I put the finishing touches on my make-up, straightened my hair, touched my necklace with my hand as I took one last evaluative look in the mirror, and I dashed out the door. I found myself at the top of a beautiful marble staircase, and as I rushed down I found myself looking at a tall, thin man in a four-button single-breasted tuxedo. He looked marvelous as he was beckoning me down the stairs and into a waiting car.

    In this dream state, we made our way to a theater, where there was a large throng of people packed along both sides of a red carpet. We’d arrived at a movie premiere, and all sorts of interesting people were there. I recognized some, but not all of them – Gary Oldman, Ralph Fiennes, and a man with severe features that I thought I’d seen before but couldn’t quite place.

    We all went into the theater, where we sat down and watched this film. It was complete in every detail; the only thing missing was the title. I’m sure dream theorists would be especially pleased here, as I couldn’t exactly read it (even though I think that theory is total rubbish, since I’ve read in many other dreams.)

    Anyway. The remainder of the dream was just me, sitting there with the man in the tuxedo whom I just assumed was my husband, and we watched the film from beginning to end. It was absolutely breath-taking in its beauty; the style of filming seemed to change depending on who was the subject at any particular moment. The subjects of the film were four characters – three who were committed a mental hospital of sorts, and one of the patients’ husbands.

    There was Devon, a man in a wheelchair who seemed as if he were mentally handicapped, but was brilliantly intelligent, if painfully shy. Gary Oldman had apparently played a man named Gabriel, a painter who was slowly losing sight after having lost everything else of importance in his life, including his wife.

    And then there was Emma. She was pale with curly hair, once a prominent and vibrant part of London society. But through some unfortunate and unknown event, she had become despondent, she was scared, and she’d been traumatized. Then there was her husband, Bennett, who apparently was played by Ralph Fiennes (I think I’d just recently seen Quiz Show, so I think that’s probably where he came from. But still, he did a remarkable job, in my dream anyway.)

    The film played out as Emma was brought to the hospital, located in a gorgeous secluded estate in the French countryside. There, Gabriel noticed her, having met her previously at a social event in London. He tried desperately to befriend her, but no matter what, Emma wouldn’t speak. She was shell-shocked and skittish, never willing to look anyone in the eye. And if she was provoked, all hell would break loose, as she seemed to be inhabiting painful, traumatic memories, wherein she would parrot others.

    The cinematography was brilliant. The moments wherein Devon was featured, the framing was simple, the colors were somewhat blanched, and everyone seemed so much bigger or so much smaller than they truly were. With Gabriel, the world started out as brilliant, vibrant, excessively bright, with colors exploding everywhere you look. But as the film goes on and his eyesight diminishes, the focus goes soft and the colors start to fade. With Emma, the world was sharp, jarring, never quite right, the colors always slightly off. The scenes where the three of them interacted – particularly outside in the back lawns of the hospital – were particularly interesting, as the style faded between the three of them.

    As the plot unfolded, slowly the details of what had happened to Emma came forward because of Gabriel’s persistence, Devon’s quiet and unquestioning trust, and her husband’s unwavering patience. At the end, after a few more traumatic events at the hospital, the truth is finally divulged about what happened to Emma that caused her to be so shell-shocked and secluded within her own mind.

    The film ended, the curtain close, and the applause erupted. As I stood up and shook the hands of the actors, I slowly began to wake up.

    When I was finally awake, I was awake with a jolt. I sat straight up in bed, ran for my computer, and began to type out absolutely everything I had seen in my dream. I created a story outline, then began filling in all the details, all the character background I somehow already knew from seeing allusions to it in the film, as well as immense descriptions of the way in which the film was shot. I knew instantly that this wasn’t necessarily meant to be a film; rather, it needed to be a book, and I had to write it.

    I spent the next several weeks working on writing the first chapter. I worked so laboriously, wanting every word to be perfect. I was never quite happy with it, but I kept working my way through it.

    As this was happening, I was also desperately trying to figure out a way to pay for college. As a home-schooler I wasn’t exactly eligible for many scholarships. That’s when my friend Sujit told me about a specific screenplay contest sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. When Sujit told me, the deadline was precisely seven days away, but it seemed like fate – the prize was precisely the amount of money I needed for school.

    I’d never written a screenplay before, but I didn’t care. I spent a few hours studying the format and then threw myself into writing. I used the plot outline I’d devise and I wrote feverishly for five days. In precisely that amount of time I had finished the script. I mailed it overnight to Los Angeles and I’d made it in just in time. I wasn’t exactly proud of it – I knew because I had rushed so much it wouldn’t be my best work – but I was confident I had done a good job with it.

    Apparently it was better than just “good” – in this highly competitive contest, my very first script made it to the finals of the competition. I didn’t end up winning, but that’s a very serious honor to make it to the finals. Some really spectacular movies were finalists in that competition.

    I started sending the script to other festivals – Austin, one in Utah, a couple others. I was a finalist in the Austin Film Festival’s script competition as well, another high honor. And yet despite all of this praise, I still wasn’t particularly proud of the script. Why?

    Because of the ending.

    I’ve been struggling for years to come up with a proper ending for the book. I’ve analyzed the whole plot again and again, determining what it is, where it came from within my subconscious, what it was supposed to mean. Despite figuring all of this out, I couldn’t figure out how to end it, and I didn’t know why.

    I think I finally figured out why.

    In going over this dream a million times, I finally came to realize what it meant as a whole, and what it meant to me.

    It’s an analysis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from three perspectives. Each of the three main characters had been through some form of a traumatic experience, and each handled it in their own way. At the time that I had the dream, I was also dealing with PTSD in my own way – this shortly before my toe was amputated, after the brain infection, after years of serious surgery to find a bone infection started by a traumatic stabbing when a doctor made a mistake during a simple procedure and then lied to cover it up.

    I’d been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I was 12. But the problem was, in everything I’d read about PTSD, it was specifically written with disaster survivors in mind. It dealt with things like survivor guilt and things like that, whereas my case wasn’t anything like that. I’d been searching for answers for years, as well as a way out of the worst aspects of the disorder. In my searching for answers I had this dream, and it basically provided so many answers to so many questions. But not the biggest and most important one:

    How does it finally end?

    This morning, as I stretched, rolled over, and roused myself from my bed, I finally figured out why – after so many years – I’ve been so unable to write any more of the book, and why i could never figure out the ending. So many times I’ve been dying to write, and so many times I’ve started in on it only to stop after a few sentences. Most of the time I physically and emotionally just couldn’t stand to write it. In fact, a few times when I would try to start writing, I’d stare at the blank word document and my keyboard and burst into tears. I knew that part of it was the overwhelming nature of my own battles with trauma, especially since I fully realized that each of the characters in the story were different aspects of myself. It was tough, facing something like that, trying to fill in the gaps, when you know it’s all you, that each and every one of these people and their problems all came from you. It starts to get really overwhelming. How do you sort through it?

    And that’s precisely it – I can’t sort through it. And it may seem so terribly obvious, but it’s so much more difficult to see something as it truly is when you’re right in the thick of it. But thank heavens, I was finally able to see the problem: I can’t sort through it with the novel because I haven’t sorted through it in life. So many times I thought I would out of the woods, so many times I thought the trauma was done and I could finally heal. But I haven’t had that chance, because it just hasn’t stopped yet. So how could I possibly write an ending when I don’t know what the final pages of my own struggle with trauma will say?

    So I’ve given up on making myself feel bad for leaving this great and very personally important project on the back-burner for so many years. I’m not going to make myself feel guilty for leaving it undone. This part of my life is still undone, it hasn’t been neatly tied up into a nice little package yet. Until that happens, I don’t think I could possibly come up with a satisfactory ending. Because if this is about me, then it just hasn’t finished being written yet.

    And now it’s 7:00AM and I’m dead tired. I need to sleep. Here’s to hoping I have another lovely and insightful dream.