A dream of a thousand writers

CW: Mass shootings.

Dear Writer,

There’s an issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic called Dream of 1000 Cats. You may have seen the episode of it on The Sandman TV series on Netflix, especially if you’ve been watching along with my Sandman podcast, Endless.

Anyway, as the story goes, a house cat who realized the brutality of her owners when they threw her litter of kittens into a river to drown treks into the Dreaming to talk to Morpheus, king of Dreams, and find out what the actual fuck.

(Okay, Gaiman was a little more eloquent about it, but I’m a fab paraphraser. Stick with me.)

Anyway, Morpheus (in cat form, of course) tells her that originally, cats were large and in charge, chasing humans for fun and devouring them for yum. But one day, a thousand humans all dreamed of a world where the power structures were reversed, and humans were big and cats were little. At that point, the world didn’t change as much as shift; history and future were both rewritten, and no one remembered that it had ever been any different.

Except Morpheus, of course.

The former house cat turned feline activist then traveled from town to town, gathering all the cats and telling them this story, so that maybe one day, if a thousand cats could dream the same dream, the world could be set right again.

From Sandman Vol. 3, Dream Country, issue 2, “Dream of a Thousand Cats.”

This morning I woke up to the news that Colorado has had yet another mass shooting. This time, in Colorado Springs, where gun-toting, 10-sewer-rats-in-a-trench-coat Lauren Boebert was recently re-elected by a hair. And the attack, once again, was on the LGBTQIA+ community; a community that, by the way, has given this world nothing but rainbows and drag and ballroom and fucking joy.

And I mean… what do you say? That hasn’t been said? Again and again and again and again?

Vote.

Vote harder.

Protest.

Write your representatives.

We’ve done that. I’m not saying we shouldn’t keep doing that, but clearly, there’s more going on here. The violence we’ve been seeing might be curbed by gun control—and we should fucking have it, no one needs a goddamn assault rifle—but the thing is, we wouldn’t need gun control if our culture wasn’t actively creating the kind of person who would buy one and use it to terrorize everyone else.

At its core, this problem isn’t about guns, or laws, or Lauren 10-Sewer-Rats Boebert.

It’s about power.

For a long time, stories have been told and controlled by the structures in power. I know this, because I’ve spent the last two decades studying those stories in our pop culture. I’ve seen where power curls itself into the shadows of our stories, and subtly inserts shards of patriarchy, misogyny, racism, homophobia, white supremacy and a whole host of other evils into the storylines and characters we loved, and in loving those storylines and characters, this poison got into us.

For those of us aligned with Power via being the identities power prefers, the poison was largely invisible to us. We were separated from those who saw it for what it was, and who lived on the dangerous edge of its sword, and even if they told us, we couldn’t—and sometimes wouldn’t—hear it.

Until recently. Look, as much as we all want to dog on social media, social media is the reason why many of us have even started talking about, and seeing, these shards of poison in our culture. Social media has given a microphone to the silenced, and it has changed everything. Even with its evils, I will take social media, because it’s the surgical knife that lanced the boil. All the gross stuff is coming out now, but it has to, or we’ll never heal.

But as Power is being challenged and torn down, in the wake of its crumbling shadow, the roaches, clinging to the stories of Power, are grabbing at their own unearned power by picking up guns and killing as many people as they can.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Stories are the most powerful force on earth. I’m not kidding. That’s why Power went for the stories first. Originally, the stories and myths we told passed on belief systems in our small communities where things were not as they are now.

Then Power came in looking to spread, and it took over. It swallowed up pagan holidays and made them into Christmas and Easter, and spread those remade stories and those bastardized beliefs as far throughout the world as they could, because stories were its path to control. It controlled the books, and who could read them. And with every new technological advancement—the printing press, photography, movies, radio, television—Power was there to decide who could tell the stories, what stories they could tell, and how they were told.

But now… Power doesn’t control the stories anymore. The control of the stories is coming back to us, through social media and independent publishing; websites; blogs; YouTube channels. Art and communication has been disintermediated, meaning that there are no longer any gatekeepers to decide who gets to be heard, and in hearing from people who were kept out of mainstream culture, we are changing.

And that is why they are shooting. Because they’ve already lost. They will make the loss hurt, but they’ve already lost.

Vote. Vote harder. Protest. Write your representatives.

And when you’re done with all that, baby, tell your stories.

Your stories don’t have to be about guns, or Power, or any of it. They can be about anything, as long as they are written without infection from the shards of Power.

Are your stories light and funny? They have power.

Sexy? Dark? Thrilling adventure? Power.

Silly? Written for children, or young adults? Oh, love. Power is dripping from your fingertips.

There’s a reason that spells and magic are always controlled with language and words. The universe is coded by language, and it’s so powerful. You may not see your own power, the power of your words, but it’s there. I promise you, it’s there.

Everything that humans have built in this world exists because someone imagined it first. We manifest what we imagine, all the time. The fight is ongoing, but we’ve already won.

Write your stories. Tell the truth. Grab your power.

Save the world.

Everything,

L