Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt I was sitting on a folding chair somewhere in the middle of an empty football stadium. How I got there is not important – why I was there is a mystery. Somehow, it felt like nothing existed outside the stadium – or the stadium was the whole world.
As I was looking around, my cell phone started to ring. I answered.
“Hey, I enjoyed your last book,” said the voice on the phone.
I didn’t answer – I was quite shocked, since I was surrounded by empty seats and it was clear to me there was nothing else outside the arena.
“Say,” the voice continued, “can you give me an autograph?” Then he (it was a male voice, though it sounded a bit synthetic) pointed me to a certain section and a very specific seat in the stands.
This time I wanted to protest but before I even opened my mouth the call was disconnected.
So I sighed and started to walk towards the stands – even if there was no one in view. I went up the stairs, took a left, then a right, and finally found the seat the voice on the phone had mentioned. It was mostly empty. Nobody was sitting there but there were three objects neatly laid down on the seat. My last book, in paperback edition, a cell phone and an umbrella.
Remember this was a dream? It made perfect sense to me that the fan that had just called me was an umbrella.
Mechanically, I reached inside my breast pocket, took out a pen and wrote down a couple of words on the book’s title page: “To my first umbrella reader. Best wishes, Cris.” Then I signed my name.
Conveniently, at this point I woke up.
It was during the weekend and still dark outside, so I tried to make some sense of this dream, maybe derive some useful moral lesson. I said to myself “It probably means that there are no two readers alike. Everyone’s different – and they want to find different things in a book. Maybe some of them are oranges, maybe some are apples.” Now, writing can be a very intense experience. Sometimes it feels like things just want to get out of your head and onto the paper. It’s so easy to forget that, although you write for yourself, you publish for your readers. I like to believe that, while I tell the stories as they play on the inner cinema of my mind, there is something in them that even the odd umbrella reader can relate to and benefit from.
So here’s hoping that I get to reach you, wherever you are and however fantastic you may look like.
Cris
PS By the time I finished this the section, row and seat numbers were long forgotten, so I never got to get rich playing them at the lottery.