I woke up this morning dreaming of Harlan Ellison. I never met the man but I think I have worked with people who have met him. My first exposure to Ellison was in my high school days in the 1980’s when I wrote descriptive vignettes for an English class, enjoyed them, and kept writing them. Then I gave them to my brother who said he thought they were better than the stories Harlan Ellison wrote when he was a teenager. He gave me a copy of The Essential Ellison. I’m sure he meant to inspire me to keep writing, but I took it the wrong way.
You see, I have a massive character flaw that tells me I am the smartest person in the room. This flaw first made an appearance in Kindergarten, where I knew I was the youngest person in the class and I knew how to read. The school wanted me to wait a year because my birthday is in early September. My next door neighbor who was exactly three weeks younger than me did start the next year and he seems to have done all right learning to socialize. The teacher was angry that I knew how to read and that I would “never be a reader” because I was not “taught properly”. To this day I have no idea what that means and neither does my wife (a teacher) or her aunt (who was a teacher in the same school district I grew up in and knew my kindergarten teacher). I am also the youngest member in my family and younger than all my first cousins by at least 10 years, so I have always been playing catch up. At Thanksgiving I was at the kids table with my cousin’s kids, not with my family. These memories only bolstered the lie I have told myself that I am the smartest person in the room.
And I don’t mean to say I need to be seen as the smartest person in the room, but that I actually am. The incoming US Administration will demonstrate exactly how bad things can get full of people who believe, or insist, on being the smartest person in the room.
And of course this attitude that I carried in childhood made me a target for bullying, so I started to shit-talk myself publicly to take the wind out of the bullies’ sails. Eventually it worked, and then the students stopped bullying me too.
And this brings us back to Harlan, in a way. My second exposure to Harlan was when he did mini-reviews and essays for the Sci Fi Channel back when it was actually showing Science Fiction and producing radio plays and podcasts and I think they even had a magazine. I watched Ellison deliver these things and thinking “I don’t think I’d like Harlan Ellison as a person. We wouldn’t get along.” He was abrasive.
Now in his defense I also remember seeing a video of some public event where they took questions from the audience and some kid asked a question implying that Harlan thought everyone around him were idiots. I remember Harlan got in the kid’s face and challenged him. Apparently Ellison never directly said we’re all idiots, but somehow his personality makes that easy to read.
And that brings us back to the dream that woke me up this morning. The event, as far as I could tell, was like World Con at the Public Library. There was a section devoted to rules of writing with Asimov, Clarke, and Ellison. Only in the dream Ellison was there and furious. “I never said these things,” he complained. Then the dream cut to later, as dreams often do, to Harlan asking me about my own writing, which I admitted has slowed down a lot and isn’t very good and he challenged me.
“Josh, why do you talk to yourself like that?”
I woke up before I could answer.
One of the ways I have disparaged myself over the years is to frequently call myself an idiot, out loud and in public spaces. I have learned that I am not the smarted person in the room, and in fact being the know-it-all goes against one of my key defining words of knowledgeable, because that word for me means always willing to learn. I can’t learn anything if I think I already know it and I love to learn things. To counter act the projected know-it-all attitude I have a catchphrase: It’s my way or the right way. I know I make mistakes because I’m a human being, and they do bother me, so maybe it’s all a way to alleviate the mental suffering of wanting to be smarter than I really am.
It is ultimately a story I tell myself to counter the even worse story I tell myself. And maybe that story is no longer working for me. Why was it Harlan Ellison in the dream? I actually haven’t read much of his work and he is a very mythological character for me, but who else could get through. I need a challenging voice to get through the crap and make me ask the hard questions that I need to ask myself. A kinder voice (for example, my wife who has been trying to get through to me for years with love and kindness) isn’t working. Kindness is running up against the brick wall of know-it-all.
So I wanted to capture this dream and what it means. I don’t believe dreams are prophetic in any way, they are the side-effects of the brain cleaning things up during sleep, filing away information and maybe making a new connection or two. In that respect, I try to figure out what I’m telling myself. It was also important to capture because the title brought up “I dreamt of David Mamet” by The Bobs, and that’s a very distracting song.