My dream (repeat from my facebook but I want this here)

I had a dream about Samuel Clemens the other night.  In the dream I was sitting with an old typewriter staring at a blank peace of paper.  There were four walls around me, two tall windows on both sides of the desk.  There was a glass filled with something that may or may not have been lemonade as I did not drink it.  I am just assuming that is what it was because of the color and what appeared to be pulp at the edge of the glass.  I was taking in the room and what it was supposed to mean in the dream.  I hear someone walk into the room and turn towards them.

            “You haven’t written in a while,” he said, cigar in mouth and smoke encircling his head.

            “Nope,” I said looking back at the paper. 

            He pulled up a chair out of thin air.  This high back chair was covered in the finest fabric and it was beautifully crafted.  He sat down proud, his long legs then stretching out in front of him.  A table appeared beside him and he placed the cigar down.  His grand fireplace appeared next and suddenly we were in his home in Hartford Connecticut.

            My chair was now gone and I was sitting on the floor before him.  Eager, as I am sure his children were, to hear his story.

            “The key to a good story is to always start, the finishing part is up to you.” 

            I looked at him and frowned, “if I don’t finish, no one will hear my stories.”

            “You did, you know your stories and sometimes that is all that counts.”

            “I just feel like I am failing.  I was always told that being a story teller was my gift.”

            “You know your problem, you argue too much.”  I looked at him and felt baffled for a moment.  “You argue too much.  You just want to be right.  You want to be a failure with writing so you are going to argue with me that you are.”

            I felt tears streaming down my face, not because I was just scolded by Samuel Clemens but because he was right.  I argue my failures to everyone.  He looked at me and smiled.  He put his hand on my cheek and wiped away the tears.  “My dear, you know what your first step to being the writer everyone else says you are is going to be?”

            I was afraid to even ask at this point but I did.  “What?”
            “Start listening, you understand human ego and humanity at such a profound level.  In that way you remind me of myself.  The only problem you have is you forget to listen.  You constantly get praised for what you have written, done and yet it is the negative that you focus on.  You ask people for their criticism but don’t listen to the positive things that are said to you.  What is it you tell people in your groups, something about focusing on the positive?  So maybe you should start listening, to yourself, to others.  To take the negative comments as gospel, take them as a challenge.  If I took every negative comment made about me I think I sincerely would have stopped writing before I began.  Truth is, you need to start listening, take the positive and embrace it.  Do not take the negative as the guideline that you should just stop doing what you love.”  He paused and the smoke began to fill the room, the smell of the cigar smoke thick and strong.  He smiled at me and said, “I believe in you.”  As the smoke swirled around the room faded out.

            I was staring at the paper and on the paper was written this.  What you are reading and I knew when I woke from my dream I had to write some thing that looked like that moment.  Some sort of piece of the conversation I had with him.  Whether he visited in spirit to give me a pep talk or it was simply a dream it was true.  All of what he said to me about me was true and for that I am grateful.