Dreaming in Sophie

I have heard than when a person becomes immersed in the culture of a foreign country, she begins to dream in the new language. And I have seen this happen too; when my neice returned Spain after only seven weeks of complete immersion, she would begin a sentence in English but lapse into Spanish halfway through her words. It was as if some other person interrupted her to finish the thought, the way married couples or best friends do.

I do not speak a foreign language fluently, but last night, I began to dream in Sophie.

Not a dream about Sophie, but in Sophie, as if she and I were one.

I was a bit behind on writing pages from Anna Karenina, so I spent a good chunk of Saturday catching up and copied over seven pages before my hand finally revolted. On Sunday, I went back to it, sticking with my usual two pages, and some change, in hopes of staying caught up. For the first time in the novel, I have encountered a lengthy period occupied by only two women, Anna and her sister-in-law Dolly, who is deciding whether or not to forgive her husband for an affair with the governess. Perhaps the quantity of time spent copying the discussion of how women are nothing without their husbands and families, coupled with a defense of how a man's affair has nothing to do with his sacred love for his wife, merged my subconscious with Sophie's in a new way.

Whatever it was, I woke at 5am this morning, feeling not quite myself. I can't quite explain the dreamstate, or how it felt. I only know that something has shifted, in the novel and in myself. And its funny, because it is not a feeling that makes me want to completely turn to my writing at the expense of my household chores and family relationships. In fact, in addition to the nearly ten pages of AK that I copied, I also cleaned the chicken coop, gave the children's sermon at church, baked zucchini muffins, folded laundry, and helped 12 and Almost 17 clean their bedrooms. I folded laundry, swapped out summer clothes, all this after having dinner with my husband and some friends on Friday night. Writing this list feels a tad bit arrogant, but I am telling you this, because the weekend is not a typically productive time for me, a fact that makes me feel even more that my body has been possessed by another creature.

There are so many times when writing feels perilously simliar to mothering, that feeling that another being is suckling off of your energy stores, that somehow you must muster the energy to rise and greet the demanding creature that you have created. I entered willingly into this project, at least at the beginning, but now, she is here, a beating heart that I cannot neglect.

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