Why writers need to dream

Why should a woman over fifty rest her wings, pack away her feathers, and curl up in compliance?

Why should she settle for comfort, perhaps, but no more flight? But I am the witch in her nightgown, stirring the cauldron of my own mind, unafraid to gaze into that steam and see myth, menace, or beauty. Isn’t imagination the oldest sin, the ripest fruit, the first act of faith?​

I have spent my life learning to inhabit the realm behind my mind, where pain is not an anvil but gold spun by hand. Each ache becomes an ingredient, each hesitation a pinch of salt for the story’s stew.

Give me your sorrow, and I will dress it in velvet, your pleasure, and I will sharpen it until it makes the heart stammer. Do we not owe ourselves this alchemy? Why must dreaming be left to the young, the unblemished, when the richest wine is poured from the barrels longing?

Writing is not a meek act. Reading, too, demands an open wound and a greedy eye. I have read to survive, to imagine I am not alone, to discover the echo in another woman’s chest when the world would cover her mouth.

What use is safety if the cost is silence? I would rather be devoured by a sentence than starve in decorum. Do you feel that hunger, that gnawing, that midnight need? Has the world ever told you, This is not for you? Were you tempted to believe it?

Imagination strips the world’s polite veneer from the bone. In the mind’s theatre, everything is permitted. Each secret, each wound, each gasp reimagined as a possibility.

The ordinary kitchen, sunlight in a chipped teacup, becomes a temple for resurrection. In the shadows behind the stove, a love affair or a death wish might bloom, unchecked. Does the world see an older woman shelving groceries, or do they sense the she-wolf she keeps under her skin, pacing, story-starved?

When I write, I dream aloud. My fingers tuning to storms and laughter, grief and wild courage. I build labyrinths from sentences. I summon gods and daughters, lovers and ghosts with only the breath I possess. Reading, I drink from the well another woman left behind, and my own thirst deepens, multiplies. Is this not immortality? Is this not holy work?

What if age is the moment the mind casts its wildest spells, when wisdom and desire collapse into story, forging new worlds out of weathered flesh?

Imagination does not retire but takes the throne, finally unchallenged.

I am not the woman they saw. I am the woman I have written.