Definitely, a dreamer... that's what a novelist must be.  Able to handle things that don't make sense.  Again, respecting the form, the birth of the new...

Some things are called novels, and they are not new at all, but very old, and predictable, and people like them as distraction, and they sell.  That is one kind of 'novelist.'  Good as far as form, on plot tightness, on solving the crime, the crossword puzzle.  Examples abound.  But they are not, truly, novels, and might indeed do some disservice to the form.  But because such things as these, mysteries, courtroom thrillers, Vincent Flynn/Tom Clancy homeland security/Nelson DeMille society pieces, are taken, popularly, as successes of the novel, a certain view has taken over.   To restore a great respect from the true dream-like almost childish efforts, what can you do?  Flaubert, Quixote, lines from Yeats--

I have met them at close of day  
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey  
Eighteenth-century houses.

what else can cleanse the mind so that the real vibrations of a novel might come out, as they do in Kerouac's picaresques.    Even Hemingway is prone to let the novel down, though he tried to resurrect it, make a long short story technique into something more dreamlike, not his strength.  Kundera is the expert, and I honor him, for helping me, an honest blind clown trying to catch a rabbit, understand the form.

Who amongst us could write a novel?  Is it possible anymore?  This is why I don't mind 5 AM, the chirping of first birds.

Earlier this evening, I dreamt of low income housing for people like myself, an invasive proliferation of rats, my friends the cats I've always had in my family, old Muffler, the tiger tabby big old male, the shoot-outs outside in this poor neighborhood, my own restaurant friends involved in the struggle against rats and thugs.  There is a feminine spirit helping me, not remembered now.

No wonder he wrote at night, Dostoevsky,
as if by ignoring humanity he would then have
a better sense of it.