A Dreaming Place

When Alexander Graham Bell moved to Canada in 1870 he was not expected to live. He was just 23 years old. Frail and coughing, it was thought he would soon succumb to TB, just as both his brothers had.

His family settled in Brantford, Ontario, and soon the young Bell's health began to improve. Eventually, he thrived. He created a workshop in a carriage house on the property and he discovered a thicket of trees perfect for dreaming under. He called this special spot his "dreaming place”. Overlooking the Grand River, it was there he conceived the idea that would become the telephone.

Everyone needs a dreaming place.

It might be next to rippling water and swaying trees, if you're lucky, but it can be anywhere. I've created dreaming places in basement apartments, rented rooms, attics, turrets and cafes. But they all start in my head.

Currently, I live in a small apartment with a big front window and a nice back porch. They both make for good dreaming places. The outdoor porch is surrounded by beautiful trees, but when weather drives me inside, my living room becomes my main place for dreaming/creating. This room has a fridge in a corner, sitting just outside of the closet-sized kitchen. Yes, this place is very small.

Though it's no Parisian garret my tiny abode is fit for dreaming - or as Brenda Ueland calls it: "moodling".

Dreaming places have physical characteristics that create a mood: peaceful breezes, scents of flowers, hubbub of coffee-drinkers, music of wind chimes, autumn leaves, moonlight, etc.

Sometimes, I create the mood by screening old movies while I work - mostly flicks I've seen many times, so that I don't have to focus on them. They facilitate my work in much the same way that sitting next to the window does: by setting a tone that invokes creativity. And every now and then, I can look up at the scene just outside the window or on the screen and find inspiration for the next stage of my work.

Later in life, Alexander Graham Bell said: “As I look back upon it, visions come to me of the Grand River and of Tutela Heights and my dreaming place upon the heights where visions of the telephone came to my mind.”

Here’s a nod to that dreaming inventor, on the 100th anniversary of his death, via a few celluloid favourites of mine that feature his most famous invention -

Dial M for Murder. 1954. Grace Kelly's husband, played by Ray Miland, calls her from a polished wooden phone booth in a posh men's club. In their home, Grace picks up the receiver of their stylish 1940s rotary phone - and...

Pillow Talk. 1959. Doris Day, glowing like radioactive cotton candy, picks up her phone to make a call only to hear the cad she shares her line with crooning to some smitten female. Back in the '50s if you wanted a phone, you had to share the line with some stranger in your city or neighbourhood. It was called a party line. Every time Day picks up the receiver on one of the (at least) three phones in her lavish apartment, she hears the cad (played by Rock Hudson). She needs her phone for business and Hudson's constant crooning over the wire makes her blood boil. This party line is no party at all, but the film's a romcom, so...

His Girl Friday. 1940. Roz Russell putting her coat on while talking on one of the many candlestick phones in the newspaper office. She gets all tangled up, with the cord running inside the sleeve she's put her arm into - a symbol of her growing entanglements, both romantic and professional.

The Slender Thread. 1965. Following Anne Bancroft's Oscar-winning turn in The Miracle Worker, she starred in another film where communication is a key theme. Only Bancroft's voice is heard for much of the film, as she is on a speaker phone in a crisis clinic. A student, played by Sidney Poitier, works frantically to keep her on the line because she's already swallowed a lethal dose of pills. He has to keep her talking till the call can be traced. The film is noted for its depiction of the physical tracing of a phone call.

The Maltese Falcon. 1941. Sam Spade with a hardboiled ear pressed to the receiver of a black rotary phone, held there by his shoulder as he rolls a cigarette. A classic noir blower. Sam talks on a few different styles throughout this film, including a licorice-black candlestick in his home.

It's A Wonderful Life. 1946. Mary is talking to Sam (Hee-Haw) Wainwright and she wants George in on the conversation. They are pressed close together with the candlestick receiver held between them. George is a bundle of conflict and desire. He is so close to Mary he can smell her hair and it drives him crazy. But he wants to see the world, gall darn it! Talk about growing entanglements.

Midnight Lace. 1960. Another Doris Day film, but not a fun frolic on a powder-pink phone. Rather, a sinister plot played out on a stylish-if-menacing, bone-white phone.

Meet Me in St. Louis 1944. On the blower from NYC to St Louis in 1903: the phone is a big wall-mounted thing in the dining room. There's a possible marriage proposal at stake but with the whole family in the same room as the telephone, intimacy is challenged. It doesn't help that the call recipient has to yell into the mouthpiece to ask her suitor to repeat himself many times over.

Thank you for reading!