top of page

Fictivity: Constant Creation and What It HasTo Do With Writing


I developed a theory when I was younger about dreams. I began to wonder if, rather than mental events which occurred while we slept, dreams were actually a phenomenon which happens to us all the time — but at nighttime, free from distractions, the mind sees the images and narratives which have been going on all the time through the day, projected clearly against its own screen. It would be as though we had a film playing all the time but its colours and sounds were completely drowned out by the day’s actions, the bright lights, the demands around us, the distractions and engagements. As we lie down in bed and close our eyes, the ‘lights go off’ and we see what has been there all along, ‘in the back of our minds’.

It’s possible to get some kind of subjective reality on this by closing one’s eyes at any time and observing for oneself what is ‘going on’ in one’s mind. There you’ll probably find random images, snippets of stories, incidents