Dream Log: Rich & Famous, Yet Again

Last night I dreamed that my blog was blowing up literally overnight, and that when I woke up in the morning I had become rich and famous, literally overnight: millions of pageviews, millions of dollars via GoFundMe, the promise of even greater sums via ads on the blog and book deals, reporters waiting outside my front door to interview me, me acting silly in the interviews, singing in deliberately silly ways into the video cameras, doing the munkee routine and so forth. Standing very stiffly and declaring in a very constricted voice: "I'm a delightful person." Hilarious stuff like that. Becoming an instant media sensation, just like Gore Vidal or Fran Lebowitz.

I have that dream a lot. Surely some of you have noticed. It astounds me that so many artists -- yeah, I called myself an artist again, get over it -- really seem to care so little about being rich & famous. One big exception, I recently learned, one artist who wanted very badly to be rich and famous, was -- Vincent Van Gogh. Yikes!

Maybe all of that bullshit about how the secret to getting it, whatever "it" is, is ceasing to want it, is actually true. ... Nah, it couldn't be! It's malarkey! Also, don't worry, I'm not going to cut off my ear and then shoot myself in the stomach and linger for several excruciating days before dying. Because -- what if I suddenly became rich and famous 3 days after I died of an excruciating self-inflicted wound? No, I'm going to hold on and stubbornly wait for fame and fortune, even if it comes so late that I'm completely senile and can't tell the difference. That'll show 'em!

Once again today, I woke up and it hadn't actually happened: enthusiastic celebrities, authors and other influential people in Australia and India hadn't gotten the ball rolling with rave tweets about my blog as I slept, tweets which spurred many, many similar tweets, and mentions of my blog in blogs and in online and print columns and on radio and TV talk shows and in the speeches of heads of state, so that the tsunami of my success could roll west over Europe and into early-morning Murrka...

But it's also wonderful having the dedicated readers I have in real life, it absolutely is. You guys should be flattered by the dream. What the dream is about, in my analysis, is how wonderful the world would be if everyone was like you guys. I'm not good at expressing appreciation, I know I'm not. The munkee stuff is, in part, about how I wish I could be, and how I wish I were more open emotionally. mee r munkee. mee luv yu. yr verr nice person. yu rillee r.

Real reality definitely has its upsides. I'm attempting to live more in reality and less in the Walter Mitty day-dream-verse.

...Okay, maybe I'm not trying very hard yet. I have to daydream to some extent. Writing is, to one degree or another, daydreaming. Certain passages of certain sorts of fiction are up to 100% daydreaming. And the percentage of daydreaming in the process of writing so-called "non-fiction" is nowhere as close to 0 as certain DULL pretentious creators of non-fiction would have you believe.