My son's imagination has sparked into being, or, at least, it is now made more visible to me through language. Now a cardboard box becomes a rowboat he climbs into and out of singing, "Row, row, row your boat;" a small saucepan becomes a crib for his blue and red plastic Superman toy. He demands a lullaby for Superman, then slams the lid onto the pot, calling out, "Close the door!"
He is both emboldened by his mind's developments, and made a bit more fearful. He walks into a closet and then comes running out, plunging his head into my leg, wrapping his arms around me, saying "Noises!" Or he rushes from a corner of a room to my safe knees, asking "What happened?" anticipating my next question to him. Whatever has happened cannot yet be communicated. But as boxes are rowboats, so closets contain dark hidden dangers. Imagination makes us powerful, world creators, and at the same time holds a startling power over us.
I recently had a nightmare that was unlike my usual nightmares. I was not alone in a part of the city that I thought I knew suddenly turned an unrecognizable, strange web of alleys and elevated trains. I was not drugged or unable to dial a telephone. A jet plane did not come hurling out of the sky, and nosedive the ground a block away.
No, this one seemed designed by a different maker, a B-horror-film director. But the work of this hack was vivid, searing. I feel nauseated even now, maybe a month or two later, at the thought of summarizing it. It involved clusters of blueberry-like tumors (so blueberry-like they may have actually been blueberries) growing out of my forehead just where hair meets skin.
I can no longer eat blueberries. And the nightmare hangover in the days following was extreme. I kept rubbing my head, as if to reassure myself no rogue bulbous purple-y lumps were bursting forth. I occasionally felt an urge to cover my eyes when the images flashed again in front of me. Of course, the images were not out there, but in here, and eye closing was entirely beside the point.
As I felt tormented, I kept thinking, You wrote that. You designed that dream to make you sick. The gross-out factor was all your doing. Who knew you could write such a weird genre dream? This comforted me. My range of imagination growing. Troubling, yes, and masochistic, but maybe more expansive, too.
I loved the novel Atonement in part because it laid bare the power and menace--the sadism--of a child's imagination. Its life creating and destroying capabilities. It reminds one not to be too precious about the imaginary life of the young. "The chandelier didn't fall on your head?" So a family friend, shocked to find his fantasy life had somehow failed him, greeted his mother one day when she picked him up from school.
The story I want to write is of a young boy of seven or eight. His parents have separated and his mother is having an affair. She meets her lover at an old-fashioned fancy hotel and when she does this, she deposits the boy with his backpack of notebooks and pencils and stories in a winged armchair in the hotel lobby to entertain himself. He will be safe there, she thinks. There, he spends long afternoons and evenings drawing and looking through books his father once read him, and making up excuses to the staff and patrons as he knows it is not quite right that he has been so left alone in this in-between place, this world of adults. He begins to tell his mother elaborate stories of the people he has met and the scenes he has witnessed in her absence, and as the tales grow more ominous she tries to decipher what is real, and what may be imagined.
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