Illness and Writing

I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that so many of the great classic writers had at least one long stretch of being confined to bed; Robert Louis Stevenson comes to mind, and I know there are many others. There’s something about being stuck in bed, staring at the ceiling, that makes one drift into ralms of heretofore unexplored imaginings.

My back went out two days ago, and since then I’ve had a number of incredibly bizarre dreams, including one about being attacked by “mind flayers” that looked like small stuffed dragons with ribbony tentacles; all you had to do was grab them and pop off their small heads to overcome, though, and they were only dangerous if you didn’t know they were there … yeah.

Well, the point I’m making is that I think a creative mind requires a lot of quiet to churn in, and being forced to sit idle refreshes the well, so to speak, for those of us who don’t normally want to slow down. Perhaps injury and illness are the creative soul’s ways of interfering and making us abandon those material things like cleaning house and paying bills, which suffice for work in the “real world” but does nothing to advance out creative work.

Then again … I could just be ranting and bored after three days stuck in bed. Who knows?