Writers Dreaming

3. I think sometimes you should recognize the power bad things can have. It's important to tell people if you're hurting, you know?  But there's such a wide variety of 'bad things', in variations of intensity and effect, affecting different people differently. If someone doesn't want to talk about their problems, you have to find a way to support them in a way that respects their boundaries. 

4. Definitely, especially as a personal truth. I've had dreams like that. I remember one where I dreamed that I was a kid again, walking around an empty elementary school. I was looking for other people but couldn't find any. When I found a classroom with people in it, they yelled at me and locked the door. And I waited in the hall. The bell rang and suddenly I was locked inside the school.

Less dramatic "truth dreams" are more common. If I'm playing too much of a video game, I'll dream that I'm playing that video game. Or worse, I'll dream that I'm in that video game. Which isn't that fun when you've been playing through Silent Hill or something. If I miss someone I'll dream about doing something random with them, like wandering around an opera hall with tap dancing singers following us.

6. Unfortunately, I'm only fluent in English. When I lived in Florida, I picked up on a little, a tiny bit of Haitian and Spanish. But I've forgotten it all. I'd love to learn... Mongolian, just so I could speak the language if I ever visit Mongolia. Not only that, of course. French for its practicality. Arabic for the poetry (also practical), Japanese for media, Spanish for practicality (and music), and I could go on and on. 

I love living in places where people speak multiple languages. There was a certain music in hearing people speak English, Spanish and Haitian Creole all together in the Florida school hallways. Even better when people mixed the three together! I love the sound of languages, of differing sentence structures and sayings, the differences in tone. It's be extremely boring if everyone spoke English in this country. I say the more languages the better!

8. This is very, very true. Facts can be misrepresented, cherry picked, or just decontextualized to serve any point, any agenda. To simply say "50000 people were unemployed" does not describe the hardship they went through, or the reasoning for them being unemployed in the first place. Genocide apologia occasionally attempts to use fact as truth, for example, "x killed x amount more people than y, thus y wasn't that bad". Boiling history and events down to pure fact and numbers has a problem of dehumanizing those affected.