The dream

Brian Wilson

“That’s nice Mr. Wilson, but what do you have to show for yourself since then?” the voice asked.

Dreams are weird things. I have always thought of my dreams as my mind’s way of sorting through all the materials and experiences I have during the day attempting to sort it all out. Some are destined to be remembered forever like that embarrassing incident in the third grade, or the jaw dropping beautiful scene of snow covering the scrub pine and brambles in my parent’s backyard on a winter day when I was about 12 and how I wish I had gone into the house to get a camera.

Other items will be forgotten almost instantly — like what your spouse told you last night about some very important plan that they made and you may or may not have to be at and you have to then play along hoping for context clues to tip you off to the right answer.

Other times, my dreams remind me of my frailties and insecurities. My theory is that this is some subconscious part of my mind knocking me down a few pegs when it thinks I am getting too full of myself.

There are also the occasional nightmares. For newspaper editors perhaps the biggest recurring nightmare is being chased by blank pages of newsprint with nothing to put on them and the deadline clock getting closer and closer. The blank newspaper guy is one scary dude.

This is closely followed by a blank computer screen with its flashing cursor sitting in the upper left hand corner of a blank word-processing program page. No matter what you try to type the words disappear instantly while you begin to doubt your ability to even type in your own name without screwing it up.

The other common nightmares are waking up wondering if you mixed up the headline on a story and swapped names or changed a word that drastically changed the meaning. In one case, I was so shaken by such a dream that I got up and drove into work at 2 a.m. just to triple check the page before it went to press later that morning.

All of these pale in comparison to having your sleeping mind questioning if “that” is all you have to show for your efforts.

If you look on the front page of The Star News (or any other newspaper for that matter) you will notice at the top it says the number and volume of the paper. You can go look, I’ll wait.

What many people don’t realize is that copies of the paper are bound into books with each book being a volume and each week’s paper being the numbered chapters in that book. In the era before digital archives and boolean or keyword searches, this was to help make it easier to find a specific issue.

At The Star News, we keep the bound books going back to the 1800s in heavy wooden cabinets in our basement. The pages in the oldest editions are too fragile to handle and seldom are brought out, we use microfilm when we need to get items from those.

A year before I started at The Star News, a new cabinet was started. On each shelf there is a year of newspapers. Some of the books are thick, others thinner reflecting both the local economic conditions and amount of news that took place that year.

In few other professions does someone have the ability to walk down a flight of stairs, open a cabinet and literally see their entire life’s work laid out before them in orderly rows.

“Is that all you have to show for yourself?” the disembodied booming voice asked me.

In those volumes are countless missed family dinners, hundreds of late night writing sessions to get a story out on deadline, the occasional brilliant turn of phrase or the story that helped bring about positive change in someone’s life.

“Is that all?” the disembodied dream voice said once more, as if passing judgement on my worthiness.

“No.” My dreaming self replied. There is so much more to write — more stories to share, more ways to help make our community and world better, more ways to bring people together. There is always more.

I like to imagine that someday when I am long gone, some future staff member will stand before the cabinets of books, like I did, in awe, as a young reporter, and imagine what stories needed to be told.

“If you will excuse me,” I said to the voice. “It is time for me to get up and get the paper to bed.”

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.