The Dreams of Dogs

My dog lies on the carpet and barks, whimpers and growls in her sleep. Sometimes, I put my hand on her and she calms down. Dogs imagine. They dream. Bears have been seen sitting alone, watching the sunset. We pretend we're the ones plugged into Heaven, but maybe we just pretend there's a Heaven. I don't know.
     My second rule of life is the Three N's. ‘Nobody Knows Nothing.'
     Have a conversation with anyone, friends - strangers, it doesn't matter. Everyone is full to the top with facts, with truths they want and need to share. But nobody knows nothing. "Of course there's a God," someone says.
     "Prove it."
     "Just look around you," they say, with a sweeping gesture of the hand. "How can you deny there's a God behind all this beauty?"
     Even the question defies logic.
     In Zen, it's said:
     This is all there is                           
     The path comes to an end
     Among the parsley

     No god, and still there's beauty.
     What makes a writer is knowing we can create any world, any fact, and people will believe it long enough to be interested. Vampires, Gods and other fairies, the fiction of history and the future. Our minds are gullible to any story well-told.
     That's why there's a responsibility to tell the truth, even in fiction. Truth is nothing but logic. At least, that's my version. Logic, in a story, means it makes sense. Things happen the way they do because they're logical. I've stopped reading more than one story because it didn't make sense, so I try not to have that happen as I write.
     Gather the thousand smartest men and women who ever lived (okay, let's just say you can). Give them a hundred years and they couldn't make an earthworm. But that doesn't mean there's a god.  It just means life's a mystery, and we're always trying to explain this ‘mystery' to ourselves.
     It's why I write. I'm trying to explain things to myself. Sometimes it works.