The Cats of San Juan. Is a lyric I wrote in a dream. One of the most beautiful lyrics I had ever written. At least that’s what I thought in my dream. It described the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The ocean, the streets, a sunset, and its resident cats — all in Spanish too! The problem is that when I woke up, I couldn’t remember a single line of it.
I was devastated when I woke up and couldn’t remember it. The feeling of having created something I felt was so beautiful and for it to slip away as easily as it had come to me was heartbreaking. How amazing, I thought, would it have been to have a lyric written entirely inside of a dream? I felt I had caught the biggest fish of my life only for it to jump off the boat as I was docking.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. The dream didn’t give me a lyric, but It taught me how it felt to write something effortlessly. I remember feeling how easily the words came to me. Each word perfectly described what I was looking at. It was as if the poem was already written and I was discovering it word by word. Since the dream happened entirely within my mind I knew I had the capacity to do it again. The question now was how? How do I do what I did in my dream in waking life? Surely it doesn’t take being asleep to write a song.
Los Gatos de San Juan El mar a mi lado, los gatos tirados las calles y las casas, el sol dorado Los Gatos de San Juan descansan en la sombra
That morning I reverse engineered the dream. I thought about the feeling of writing that lyric. I gathered what I could from the fragments of my memory of the dream to try to recreate what I experienced in hopes that I could do it in my waking life. Soon enough I came up with what I believe are the four essential components to artistic creation:
- Relax
- Don’t judge
- Imitate something that already exists. Don’t try to be original.
- Don’t take it seriously
In the dream I was relaxed. Very relaxed. I was in San Juan after all. I was taking in the sunset and listening to the waves. When a word came to me, I did not judge it. As a result, no individual word was the right word or the wrong word but it was the word. When people talk about “flow states” they’re talking about a relaxed state of being. You can’t be in a flow state if you are tense. You have to relax, and you can’t be self conscious when trying to create.
In the dream I was not trying to write an original song. I was imitating an old-fashioned salsa ballad. Imitation is the engine of artistic creation. It’s always easier to create something when using something that already exists. When it comes to jazz improvisation this is a well known technique. Jazz improvisation is built on transcription and imitation. The originality comes from the remix.
I have a habit of taking art too seriously sometimes. The dream was a reminder for me to stop taking it seriously. Art is a gift. It is a condiment. The world needs doctors, farmers, and laborers to function. Not poets, musicians, and painters. But most would agree that a world without these people is not fun. Somebody needs to have fun. That’s what the artists are for. We’re the designated fun-havers. A surgeon should take his job seriously. A musician should have fun. To be an artist is a gift. It is a privilege, even. To take it seriously is to squander that gift. Enjoy it. Have fun.
In the end, the dream was a reminder to me and indeed to anyone reading that art works outside of the executive functions of the mind. It is the part of the mind that is at rest, that is at ease, that is free of judgement. It is the part of the mind that is having fun, and not taking things too seriously. It is a reminder that the mind is capable of reaching out and beyond into the realm of divine beauty and bringing back for us a small piece of it for us to enjoy if only for a moment.