{"id":17934,"date":"2010-01-09T07:36:46","date_gmt":"2010-01-09T12:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=17934"},"modified":"2015-01-17T20:53:54","modified_gmt":"2015-01-18T01:53:54","slug":"dreaming-of-bill-shunn-and-the-plastic-typewriter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2010\/01\/09\/dreaming-of-bill-shunn-and-the-plastic-typewriter\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreaming of Bill Shunn and the plastic typewriter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I dreamt I was in one corner of a busy con suite, banging away at a toy typewriter while Bill Shunn watched me and other writers waited their turn to use it. It was a pretty crappy toy typewriter, plastic instead of metal. The keys were of a solid piece with the body, so that they didn&#8217;t move when you hit them.  The platen was fused into the rest of the machine so that it didn&#8217;t return, and there wasn&#8217;t even room to fit in a sheet of paper. So it almost looked like a fake you&#8217;d find in a furniture store to stand in for a real typewriter in a pretend office.<\/p>\n<p>Bill asked me whether I wasn&#8217;t wasting my time banging away at a machine like that.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/ScottandBillButterflyNebulas.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/ScottandBillButterflyNebulas.jpg\" alt=\"ScottandBillButterflyNebulas\" width=\"288\" height=\"233\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-17935\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And I told him no, not really. It didn&#8217;t matter whether I was leaving any evidence of what I was writing there in front of us, because I knew that whether or not I had a record, somewhere in the world, someone I didn&#8217;t know was seeing my words appear in front of <i>them<\/i>. That was all that mattered. And I went back to typing.<\/p>\n<p>Now <i>there&#8217;s<\/i> a dream that&#8217;s easy to interpret!<\/p>\n<p>A note about my dreams in general, for those of you who follow them: When I wake from a dream in the middle of the night, I&#8217;ll scribble down a few words, sometimes only two or three, as a tickler. For example, with this dream, I scrawled, &#8220;Bill Shunn waste time plastic toy platen.&#8221; Then I&#8217;ll go back to sleep. And when I wake, I sometimes don&#8217;t  even remember whether I&#8217;d had a dream or not. Until I look at the notepad. And when I read those few words, the entire dream comes rushing back.<\/p>\n<p>Is it that way for any of you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I dreamt I was in one corner of a busy con suite, banging away at a toy typewriter while Bill Shunn watched me and other writers waited their turn to use it. It was a pretty crappy toy typewriter, plastic instead of metal. The keys were of a solid piece with the body, so that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[153,12],"class_list":["post-17934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bill-shunn","tag-dreams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17936,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17934\/revisions\/17936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}