“When you realise you’re in a dream, what’s the first thing you do?”
“I dunno, try and wake yourself?”
“No. Haven’t you ever had a lucid dream?”
“I don’t think so. What’s the first thing you do?”
“You fly.”
“Fly?”
“Yeah, fly. When you wake up in a dream you start to fly. It’s the best feeling in the world. You feel freer than you’ve ever felt in your life.”
“I dunno, this lucid dreaming stuff seems like nonsense to me.”
“It’s not nonsense. I’ve done it. More than once.”
“Really? Is there a way of doing it or does it just happen?”
“Mostly it just happens when it wants to, but sometimes you can make it happen with guided meditation and stuff like that.”
“Now, see, that definitely sounds like nonsense.”
“It works, I swear.”
“I’ll believe it when it happens to me.”
“But you’ll never try it, will you?”
“No.”
“So how can it happen to you, then? You need to open your mind. You’ll never be able to write a novel when you’re so set in your ways.”
“You leave my novel out of this.”
“You do want to finish it, don’t you?”
“Of course. And I will. Eventually.”
“Not if you keep putting it off by drinking in bars like this.”
“What’s wrong with this place?”
“Well, besides being an artists’ graveyard, nothing. I’m saying nothing bad about the bar. I’m saying that you need to stay out of here for a while and finish what you started.”
“I will. Look, I’m well on the way to getting a short story published.”
“That’s great, but stories will only get you so far. You need to finish that novel. Look what happened me when I got my book published.”
“I know. And I’m still insanely jealous.”
“Don’t be jealous, be prolific.”
“I’m trying. It just doesn’t come as easily to me as it does to you. I’m not a born writer.”
“If you write, you were born to write. Think about it: you didn’t wake up one morning--or in the case of people like us, one afternoon--and decide ‘I want to be a writer’, did you? No, you woke up one day and said ‘I have a story to tell’. You didn’t choose to write that story: that story chose you to write it.”
“That’s all very poetic, but I still don’t think I’m cut out for this sort of thing. I don’t have the discipline to sit down and write two thousand words every day.”
“It’s not about discipline, my friend, it’s about heart. And I know you’ve got heart.”
“You know I’ve got heart.”
“I do. Look at that wall up there. Look at those pictures of all those dead writers. Do you think all of them sat at a desk every day and forced themselves to write? Do you think Joyce wrote nine to five? Do you think Behan kept a schedule? No! They wrote what came to them, when it came to them. And you know what? They wrote the truth. They wrote more truth than anyone who sits in an office banging out novels like it’s their fucking day job. Genius--and I mean real genius, someone who forces you to look at things differently--comes from the heart, from the soul.”
“O Captain, my Captain.”
“Shut up. You know I’m right.”
“You might be right, but I’m no genius.”
“You haven’t given yourself a chance to find out yet. Someday you might be a pencil drawing on that wall.”
“We both might.”
“You know, I can see us coming back here in twenty years, after we’ve both written our masterpieces and made our names. And you know what? We’ll talk the same old shit then as we do now.”
“To the end of our days.”
“To the end of our days.”
“I didn’t mean that as a toast.”
“But it might as well be.”
“True. This is a good bar to grow old in.”
“If we make it that far.”
“Speak for yourself. Same again?”
“No, thanks. I should go.”
“Alright. See you in twenty years, I suppose.”
“How about next Thursday? Same place?”
“Same bat-time, same bat-channel.”
“And on and on to the end of our days.”
“To the end of our days.”
“You should try out that thing. And don’t forget: what’s the first thing you do when you wake up in a dream?”
“You fly.”
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