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Today, due to a messup of my own making, I let a dream die. I think my visualizing something, picturing what words I would use, how the other person would react, how I would react, how I would feel, is cursed; never, ever have things come out exactly the way I've visualized them. Picturing getting such and such a result may work for pro athletes and for readers of The Secret, or so I am told; for me, visualizing a scenario in my head is almost guaranteed to destroy it. It may be that I actually get the words I've planned out, which happens far from often; it may be that they even sound the way I wanted them to, which is even rarer; in that case, any other person is guaranteed not to react the way I expected/wished for them to react. For that reason, learning from almost-bitter experience, I do not visualize my first novel publication very much, or meeting the love of my life and knowing he is thus, or receiving a Hugo Award. I tell life, "I want a Hugo Award; I want love in my life; I want people to read what I've written and laugh and cry and look at the world with new eyes, and I want libraries to rank my books among the most frequently stolen; now I'll leave the details up to you, because when I start specifying the details, I mess them up. Guaranteed."
And it works, actually (well, it hasn't worked for the Hugo Award, yet, but like heck I'm going to get a Hugo when I haven't yet finished something to submit!) Often when I want a conversation on a particular topic with some person particularly important to me, the conversation happens, not the way I imagined it to, but in many ways, better. And I still manage to get in the good jokes I made up, especially if it's by email (probably one chief reason I like turn-based communications better than real-time ones; the dreams live just a little, breathe just enough to see the sunrise, before they die forever as my playing them ahead of time had doomed them).
It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: you can either have the chief purpose of some action, or the details of it. If you want the chief purpose achieved, you give up on the details; and if you are going to stick your guns and stick to the details, sure, they are wonderfully clear. In your head, not in reality. And you don't get a chief purpose neither.
I tell myself that there are reasons for false dreams to die, that they die to make way for more beautiful realities.
But sometimes I still want to weep over them, silly as that is.
On other topics: Conversation with a coworker:
And it works, actually (well, it hasn't worked for the Hugo Award, yet, but like heck I'm going to get a Hugo when I haven't yet finished something to submit!) Often when I want a conversation on a particular topic with some person particularly important to me, the conversation happens, not the way I imagined it to, but in many ways, better. And I still manage to get in the good jokes I made up, especially if it's by email (probably one chief reason I like turn-based communications better than real-time ones; the dreams live just a little, breathe just enough to see the sunrise, before they die forever as my playing them ahead of time had doomed them).
It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: you can either have the chief purpose of some action, or the details of it. If you want the chief purpose achieved, you give up on the details; and if you are going to stick your guns and stick to the details, sure, they are wonderfully clear. In your head, not in reality. And you don't get a chief purpose neither.
I tell myself that there are reasons for false dreams to die, that they die to make way for more beautiful realities.
But sometimes I still want to weep over them, silly as that is.
On other topics: Conversation with a coworker:
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