For the last couple of weeks, my mind has been caught up in some of the more difficult concepts of the current project – writing which has been somewhat peculiar in my process and all too alluring in its complexity has been a challenge I have loved. But I also want to make the story accessible in a frame of mind that does not stay abstract forever, so today as I sat down to write the title of the chapter had already come to me “The days of the peach” and the chapter will focus on the primary character, the one with amnesia and his continued quest to attempt to find out just who he really is once again through a dream that is so real, he finds it in-congruent with a mere coincidence.
This is where we really start to see what is happening here, with the altered consciousnesses of the character and the concept of many worlds. I don’t dare make the character ‘know’ about the concept because that would not serve the purpose of literary needs. This is not a sci-fi book in the realm of a man going through the worlds and finding himself. This is a piece of fiction that uses science in its exposure toa fictitious character that is a representation of society.
And that is the thing, in this book, there is going to be a lot more satire than I have used previously. This character is searching for his consciousness and that is satirical in nature and will be another challenge to not make the satire too obvious.
This is how the chapter opens:
‘Shit doc. Damn dreams are haunting me. So, last night vivid as you can imagine, I am walking in a neighborhood, like I belong there. I look around and there is a girl walking next to me, she is holding my hand. It feels so warm and I feel goosebumps. I mean I actually feel them on my arms rising in the warmth of the sun as this woman, beautiful brown hair, longer than her shoulders and as silky smooth as any model. It feels soft to my touch. In this dream she wears a blouse that shows off a slight hint of peachy midriff not the type with lines so tight that she looked like a body-builder, but soft and supple. In the dream, I remember the light salty taste of her belly which looks like those girls you see on beaches, perfectly tanned and shaped perfectly above her hips.
I could have gone into deeper detail, but felt that when describing a dream that the character is having too much detail is not believable even in fiction. In real life, when we dream there are details which stand out, but we do not have categorical memory of dreams. To make this seem like a genuine dream recall scenario, I had to make the dream sequence seem as if it were real. While in the past I have taken actual dreams I have had and put them down on paper, then re-written them to fit the fictional tale, this time the dream was created from nothing, so there may be some more work to do; and I might even make more of the recollection happen later in the chapter.
Excited to be writing some good old fashioned dialogue after a few weeks of the eccentricity of abstractness!