In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes (p. 36): “[…] the organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind.”
Writers are courageous dreamers. It takes courage to battle your own insecurities, fears, and doubts when they stare back at you on the page. It is a brave task to sit with our shame. We are asking ourselves to access something that is bigger than ourselves to create meaning. The stakes for potential failure (aka protecting our conscious ego) are life and emotional death.
We dream in archetypes and images. Our brain makes seemingly disjointed connections to process and create meaning of the day’s events, conscious or not. We can consciously harness that unconscious power through SoC writing exercises. The point here is production. The more we produce the more we connect with our subconscious and ultimately find authenticity in our voice. In the process of allowing yourself to write like nobody else is reading it, you can grow and develop your writing, thereby gaining access to what it means to be you. Stream-of-consciousness writing builds a bridge between prose (or poetry) and our true self.
