Writerly Dreams

[poliphilo]

 I dreamed about a young man who thought he'd written a great book only to discover he'd plagiarised it from a course of lectures he'd attended the year before and then forgotten about. He was inconsolable. "How old are you?" I asked. "Twenty," he said. "And how many people have written great books at twenty." I replied. "You have a long life ahead of you- we hope- and in the meantime how about trying your hand at something less ambitious, like a ghost story?"

At some stage in the course of all the dreaming I did- and there was a lot that I don't remember, I started writing clerihews. One has survived. It's rare that one composes things in dreams that can stand the light of day but I don't think this lacks cogency. It goes...

H.G. Wells
Invented Heavens and Hells
At the rate of two or three a day.
He did it for pay.