I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and finding plenty of time to read.
I may get back to a tour of my study a little later, but for now I’d like to talk about dreams, and book titles.
I’m a great believer in dreams. Our minds speak to us all the time, but never so frankly as in our dreams. Yet, like the Oracle of ancient times, they speak to us in a veiled language we seldom understand, if we remember them at all, though I think they work on us even when we don’t consciously remember them. Occasionally, we can recall them fairly clearly and can puzzle over them until, usually in a sudden flash, they reveal their meanings. Other times we known they are true, even if we don’t know why, and we shouldn’t ignore them.
I once woke from a dream with the name Richard Lattimore ringing in my head. This might have been fairly normal if I knew anyone by that name. But I don’t. What I realized, though, was that this was the true name of the main character in a book I was writing, entitled “King’s Valley.” The character already had a name – Jesse something – but I awoke certain that this was the wrong name and I needed to call him Richard Lattimore. I’m sure the name carries some sort of meaning I’ve never figured out. The awkward part is that our younger son’s name is Richard, and I felt a little funny about using it for a fictional character. When I asked him about it, he told me he didn’t much care for me sausing his name for a fictional character. So I called the character Robert for a while, but didn’t feel right about it. His name was Richard and I was kidding myself if I called him anything else. So I changed it back. (Sorry about that, Rich.) And Richard he remains, though the book may never get published.
Now to the part about titles. I often have trouble coming up with a good title, and have sometimes used ideas from friends. Once, though I was working on a novel about a WWI aviator who has been badly burned in a crash and been banished to the, to him, bleak outpost of Toledo, Oregon. For a long time I simply gave the book the working title “Toledo,” though I knew it couldn’t be lamer. Then one night I woke from a dream with the phrase “Jerusalem fire” in my head. The phrase came from nowhere I could figure, but I knew it had something to do with the title of my book.
I still remembered the phrase the next morning and googled the words to see if anything popped up. To my great surprise something did. I felt as if I had looked beyond the normal world and found something waiting for me. If you type in Jerusalem fire you get an entry about the holy fire that is said to appear in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem every Easter morning. It is said to be a blue flame that burns with great purity. I knew I had a theme. The flyer asks a friend if he hasn’t been burned by some sort of holy flame, one that has nearly consumed him, leaving him burned down to an essence that he doesn’t yet understand. And I had a title, “In Jerusalem’s Fire.” Suddenly my book made much more sense to me.
Well, that’s enough about that for the moment. Maybe I’ll get back to the tour of my study for next time.