Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Reason 758 Why I Love C.S. Lewis

He got the idea to write "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" from a dream! C.S. Lewis recalled that the idea for this book first came to him when he was about 16 and began with a picture of a "faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood." He said that the image sat in his mind until he was about 40 years old when it suddenly seemed like the right time to try to make it into a story.

Lewis said: "At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him." (nota bene: you can read more about this in a few places. Please see C.S. Lewis's "Of Other Worlds", p. 42 or Robert Moss's new book "The Secret History of Dreaming", p. 104.)

C.S. Lewis is just one of several authors and musicians and other creative folk who obtain their ideas from the dream world. Even Stephenie Meyer (of recent "Twilight" fame) received the idea for the first book of her series from a powerful dream that propelled her to write.

My point is that dreaming is such a powerful and necessary activity. It is part of life or, as I believe, life itself and it would be a shame to waste all those hours just on sleep when you could be downloading important information on and about yourself and how to help this world of ours, whether through entertainment or in discovering the next big cure or revolutionary idea or (fill in the blank).

Just get dreaming. You won't regret it and will soon find it as necessary as breathing. Promise.

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