I Dream of Tranny Wigs

When I am in the middle of a ridiculously huge goal or a massive creative project, sleep becomes very important. But not just the sleeping part of sleep. That's important, too, and I've found that nine hours is a good amount for me. An amount that I never get, mind you, but the amount that I aspire to.

The part of sleep that is incredibly precious and valuable are the moments just before drifting off. My process this thus:

1. I thank God for the lessons and the gifts of the day. (New readers, don't get freaked out by my use the G-word...read this for background.)
2. I go through each lesson or gift I received, giving God props for each one.
3. If I need to "pray" for someone, I do. (It's usually if they are giving me grief in some way...I add some positive energy in hopes that the irritating thing, whatever it is, will just gently and elegantly unravel itself. Maybe while I'm sleeping!)
4. I ask for help. I don't say things like, "God, I really, really want a pony. Pleeeeeease give me a pony." I ask that the Great Creator joins me at the page. I ask for guidance and clarity. And I say this a lot: "Please guide my hand."
5. Then I drift off into blissful slumber.

I am religious (ha!) with this process because I believe sleep is where you connect with your subconscious. Sleep is when you process all the ideas from the day, and where things like random midget sightings become incredibly well-formed characters. Where the things you didn't know you noticed get processed. And then all these new connections and insights get communicated to you by your intuition later.

Basically, to me, sleep is an absolutely essential part of the creative process. It is a tool to be used, not ignored or squandered by stumbling home from the absinthe bar at 5 am.

Right now, six days in to my big book-writing project, I'm super-conscientious with my bedtime ritual. And maybe that's the reason my dreams have been so wild. I don't know. But things in dreamland are cuh-razy these days.

I've never done much work with dreams, but I just read this morning that many authors and scientists use their dreams in their creative work. The dude who invented organic chemistry dreamed about a snake biting its own tail, which gave him the model for the benzene molecule. And when author Amy Tan needs an ending, she puts her manuscript under her pillow.

So, explain this to me, would you? Last night I dreamed I was in a weird dance-theatre piece directed by Dana the Artist. All was going well until closing night when, as I was getting my props and costumes ready, the lights went out. I did the best I could in the dark, but when the lights came back on, I only had one scene's worth of stuff. Which didn't even matter because my colleagues were wearing entirely new and different costumes I had never seen before.

I cobbled together a new costume, which involved high heels, sporty tube socks and a nappy tranny wig. I went out onstage where our three-person cast had suddenly expanded to the entire cast of The Lucille Ball Show or some other 50s sitcom. And no one knew what the hell was going on. This Archie Bunker-type actor was so pissed off at the whole thing that he started talking in this impossible-to-hear whisper and my freaking parents were in the audience. It was a gong show.

Is this about my control issues? Is this telling me to go with the flow? What?