The Night Writer - NYTimes.com

Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.

What can you say about someone who rewrites his sentences in his dreams? It has probably already been said. And it wasn?t every night that he, my third-person self, rewrote sentences in his sleep. Perhaps once a week or once every other week or once every three weeks?sometimes in fact two days in a row ?whenever the subconscious compulsion took him, overriding discretion It usually happened on the road when he was sleeping in strange beds, and came about more often than not when he hadn?t had sex in a while not even with himself. So what he did, was doing perhaps, was masturbate his sentences. Was that what he was doing? Jerk them around to best advantage. Too often when he woke after hours of sleep-ridden revision, exhausted from prolonged creative effort, only the worst versions of the sentences awoke with him. His memory, he had to remind himself, traveled poorly in the night.

During the day, his sentences resisted change, stared back at him defiantly, warned him not to mess with them. And what would happen if he did? What could a sentence do to him that it hadn?t already done? And why should it even concern him what his sentences might think? As they were his sentences, he could do with them as he liked. Couldn?t he? Only if he had the courage to risk the unspoken dangers that lurked on the other side of turning them about. Not everything was susceptible to improvement, a former wife used to say. And perhaps nothing was when looked at in a certain light.

The problem, as he saw it, as he imperfectly defined it, wasn?t something you could talk to your therapist about and expect an illuminating response. At the same time, there was limited pleasure in it for him, revising sentences in his dreams, a few flashes of short-lived satisfaction, that?s all. And when you weighed that transient satisfaction against the loss of much-needed sleep, the end result was less than nothing.

And then of course the product of his night time labors was always something less than itself in the morning, something or other slipping away. He kept a notebook and pen on an end table next to the bed to indemnify his altered sentences, but in the morning his writing implements were rarely where he had left them. One tended to fall on the floor on one side of the table, the other on the other side. They were like a bad marriage. By the time he retrieved them both, his sentence had miraculously restored itself to its original unsatisfactory form, and so there was nothing to write down.

He imagined other remedies, kept a tape recorder at the side of his bed for a few days, but he had difficulty waking himself to speak into the microphone, which in no way violated his expectations. So refusing to give way to disappointment, he changed the nature of his goals. He would content himself with keeping his perfect (perhaps near-perfect) sentences solely in his dreams. So it would no longer be a question of losing the sentence by not writing them down or recording them with voice. The sentence was there, living and breathing, unseen, unread, unheard, unwritten, in the ether of his dream.

It was purer that way, more perfect (if perfect could be improved upon), and his alone, untainted by accommodation to the world outside himself, that world of potential readers that inevitably fell short of his expectations. And so those nights when in so-called dream-land, he revisited his oeuvre and reworked his sentences, he would be achieving a kind of nirvana unavailable to anyone else. And then one day, to which the preceding attests, he would write it all down, as it survives here, a lesser version of course of the perfect sentences in his dreams and whoever cared to look would be there to confirm the process and himself in the bargain, though probably not.

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com. Unfortunately, we can only notify writers whose articles have been accepted for publication.)

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Jonathan Baumbach is the author of 15 books of fiction including most recently ?Dreams of Molly? and ?YOU or The Invention of Memory.? His short fiction has been widely anthologized in O.Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere.

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/the-night-writer/

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