I read To Dwell in Dreams (Once Upon a Reality Book 2)
“It does not do to dwell in dreams and forget to live”- J.K. Rowling
It started with the first book, ‘Till the Last Petal Falls. Beauty and the Beast was my all-time favorite fairy-tale, mostly because of the bookworm-y princess I had come to love in the Disney adaptation, and so was my first to pick apart. Fairy-tales are wonderful tools to be used to teach children their first lessons in kindness, compassion, heroism and many other such laudable virtues. However, as a young woman it had come to my attention that many of the stories we tell to children are not adequate to the more complex realities we experience as adults- and sometimes that lack of nuance and criticism of a ‘fairy-tale’ outlook can lead to us as people telling ourselves stories that have fairly dire consequences. With ‘Till the Last Petal Falls, that was the story of ‘love changing the beast’ being warped by an imperfect society into the ‘someday he/she will change if I do the work of loving them enough’ that keeps battered men and women in abusive situations, and even keeps those in the victim’s immediate circles from categorizing their loved one’s situation as abusive in the first place. Through this novel I hoped to use the frame of a beloved story in order to create a new story that would give new answers, new perspectives, and even raise new questions for those of us who have now grown and know that fairy-tales are not enough.
Somewhere in the middle of writing ‘Till the Last Petal Falls I got the idea that I wanted to transform what was originally planned as a stand-alone project into a full-fledged series, Once Upon a Reality. For my second novel I would go for my second favorite fairy-tale, Sleeping Beauty. It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to use the story to critique. The immediate first idea was rape culture- in original iterations of the tale, the Sleeping Beauty character isn’t woken with a kiss, but is raped in her magical sleep and bears children, sometimes two, sometimes three, and it is the children who end up waking her. This however had been done in many re-tellings of Sleeping Beauty, and I wanted to shine light from a different corner. So I focused on the idea of bearing children in one’s sleep.
Even in a magical sleep, how would a woman go through the pain of childbirth and not notice? Why is it that in the versions where the children are present that the children are the ones who awaken the Sleeping Beauty, and not a prince or a sorceress? This drew me to thinking of those women that I have known, both personally and through reading their material or sitting through their talks, that have suffered through post-partum depression. Those women who ended up choosing abortion, or choosing adoption and later regretting it, because they didn’t have adequate support before, during and after their pregnancy. I made me think of the way they remembered how they were afraid to talk about their own fears about their pregnancy, about their children, because of the way that their loved ones reacted to it- with assumptions about how a to-be mother should feel, how she should act. Many of these women were crying out for help, and the only answer they got was: you’re going to be a mother soon. You’ll get over it, you have to.
So in Lyn, the main character of To Dwell in Dreams, I put a little bit of all of the women I knew who were like this. The one who had fears about having children because of growing up in a broken family dynamic, the one who had terminated her pregnancy because she didn’t want to grow up so fast, the one who nearly killed her first child because her post-partum depression had gotten so bad and she hadn’t wanted to go through the shame of telling anyone; the one who had nightmares about the child she had given up years ago. As with the first novel, I used the fairy-tale to structure the way Lyn’s life had gone- the three good women who raise her out of sight of a bad influence, going through a significant portion of her life ‘asleep’, having children in a state that she is incapable of being fully conscious of what is going on, etc.
For me, using the fairy-tale lends a sort of archetypal quality that makes Lyn’s story more relatable. As many a reader has told me, some of Lyn’s actions are nothing short of monstrous. And The fact of the matter is is that we, as a human society, often view women like Lyn as such. We treat the women like Lyn as nothing more than monsters, instead of looking at them with eyes of compassion and seeing in their circumstances a brokenness that we ourselves may have even contributed to. By writing these women off as monsters, we absolve ourselves of all responsibility to examine and maybe reform the way that we care for pregnant women and mothers. In writing Lyn’s story as a fairy-tale, I have hoped to show in her that common brokenness and thread of humanity that, when addressed by other characters in the story for the first time in a completely honest way, leads to her ultimate redemption.
As such, ten percent of all my own royalties from this novel go to a local pregnancy resource program known as the Gabriel Project through the Archdiocese of Denver. It is my hope that To Dwell in Dreams can be a small step in opening the dialogue about the way that we see the realm of ‘womanhood’, as each installment of Once Upon a Reality strives to do, as well as contributing to tangible efforts to support positive, life-giving changes in my own community- and hopefully someday, across the world.
Elizabeth Rose is the fiction alias of a twenty-something Colorado native with a double major in Religious Studies and English. Till the Last Petal Falls, published by Mockingbird Lane Press in February of 2013, is her first full-length novel. She has also had several short works published through such places a eLectio publishing, Hirschworth magazine and Crack the Spine. You can connect with her on Facebook, Tumblr, her blog, or her website, www.thesingingroses.com.