If you’re confused by the title of this blog post, you’re in good company. I don’t understand it either. The meaning evaporated around 3 am on a random Tuesday, along with the dream that inspired it ….
I distinctly recall waking from an absorbing and cinematic dream in the middle of the night and dictating those words into a voice memo, confident that Future Me could unpack from them the freight necessary to write a new novel, as if the phrase were Mary Poppins’ handbag. (In my defense, this usually works.) When I played the words back the next morning, they meant nothing. Not a glimmer of recollection, and certainly not an epic blockbuster of a novel.
I’ve experienced this enough times to be amused by it rather than discouraged. Dreams have long been a part of my creative work – I’ve even had the rare but awe-inspiring phenomenon of dreaming successive chapters of a novel while I was writing it. But often, it turns out more like this. There seems to exist an inverse proportion between the jaw-droppingly detailed and absorbing quality of my dreams and how easily they burst like soap bubbles the moment I wake. The absolute greatest and most compelling book I have ever read, a volume so rich and fraught that it puts to shame everything else I’ve ever read in my life, I read in a dream. Do I remember even a word? Absolutely not.
I have a long-standing habit of collecting and hoarding ideas, so I diligently transcribed the phrase into a Word document titled “Ideas for Scenes,” with a brief explanatory note for Future Mes, in case one of them could make sense of it. (We collaborate a lot more than you might think.)
Because you never know! The whole thing might still be lurking in my brain, just waiting for a casual re-read of those enigmatic words to come pouring forth in all their tautly-plotted and poetically-phrased splendor. Or – slightly more likely – Future Me might decide to just make something of those words, their original meaning be damned.
Or most likely of all, nothing will come of them other than an occasional smile as I browse my notes for fresh inspiration.
But if you have any good ideas about the Chrysalis of the Lost City, I’d love to hear them ….
Chronicler's Note: 