On Monday I shared my 10-year-old recollection of the first time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s prose poetry in my youth, and how every so often I need a booster shot of Bradbury to jumpstart my creative juices.
Wednesday morning the Ray Bradbury social media page shared a moment I had never seen before, from a 1974 interview with a journalist named James Day. The author talks about the importance of imagination, saying the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.
“Boys and girls at the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, right on up through, the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, into being something,” Bradbury says in the clip, “so when you’re a child, you begin to dream yourself into a shape, and then you run into the future and try to become that shape. When I was 10, 11, 12, I began to dream of becoming a writer …”
I love that image of “dreaming yourself into a shape.” When I was 10, 11, 12, I was writing dozens of songs and putting them on Top 40 lists on imaginary radio stations, and I was drawing my own comic books, and writing poems and collecting them into “albums” of 12 poems each, because the average record album had 12 songs, so why not poetry books?
As an adult I found myself fitting into those shapes. I went to work for real radio stations. I kept writing songs, started recording them, and tinkered with sharing them with the world, but it remained basically a hobby. My making comic books evolved into making newspapers, and I spent the second half of my career primarily as an editor.
In my semi-retirement I have published a couple dozen books as both a writer and editor, and thanks to my pastor friend who invited me to add my guitar to the worship team, I have reignited my love for making music. And thanks to modern technology that makes it easier than ever to create recordings that reflect what I hear in my head, and share them with the world, I am more than tinkering.
Ray Bradbury never stopped dreaming himself into new shapes. He dreamed of becoming a writer of science fiction stories, then of becoming a novelist, then a movie screenplay writer, then a TV and movie producer, a playwright, a poet, a mystery writer, and many other shapes.
When he died at 92, he was probably the oldest child in the world. May we all aspire to keep dreaming ourselves into a shape and running into the future to become that shape.
Ray Bradbury remains my single most important human role model.
