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How do you strike the right balance between your daily work and personal creativity? Add your comments to this blog post or send an email to wir@bbc.co.uk.

I've been thinking about how we as humans reconcile our daily working lives with our natural urge to be creative - about the relationship between our work and our dreams.

I am an Uzbek writer, and we Uzbeks have a very particular view of the relationship between reality and imagination. Here's a typical Uzbek parable to illustrate this:

Once, the folkloric hero Mullah Nasreddin was in a neighbouring village. On the way home, he bought a watermelon. Eager to eat, he split it in half and ate one half, leaving the other on the road, saying to himself: "Let him who sees this watermelon think that here was a Nobleman."

He walked for a bit, then returned, picked up the abandoned half, ate it, and said to himself: "Let them think that the Nobleman was with a servant, who ate this half."

He walked a little more, and feeling sorry, went back and ate the crust, saying: "Let them think that the Nobleman had also a donkey."

So bluntly speaking, very often we think one thing, we say another and we act in a third manner.

Pragmatism

Naturally other nations are not the same. You know, I've got a friend. A very decent person. Extremely nice character. He lives in St Albans. We had a mutual friend, also a very decent person, extremely nice character, who lived in Potters Bar.

One day our mutual friend from Potters Bar fell seriously, terminally ill. We were trying our best to help, with all kinds of alternative medicine - a fungus of a Russian birch-tree, which cured Solzhenitsyn, or a yogurt from Tibetan monks.

Only our St Albans' friend wouldn't believe too much in our fussy activity and would say: "We better be ready for the eventuality."

One day he gathered us and over a fine supper announced that we must be ready: our mutual friend would die very soon. "I am in touch with a local church and booking the day for the funeral," he said solemnly.

A couple of weeks passed, but our ill friend was still alive. But the preparations, run by our St Albans' friend (a very decent person and extremely nice character) were underway: some were discussing the agenda of the funeral, some were printing invitations, and some were listing probable invitees. I even heard that the date of funeral was already agreed... I used to sit at the bedside of my terminally ill friend, and he would whisper with dry lips:

"I'm like a passenger, whose train has been announced, but is not coming on time... "

I used to dread thinking that he knew everything... but I dreaded even more seeing how nervous and agitated my St Albans' friend was becoming, tirelessly organising everything.

I had a feeling of a strange race between the inevitable but slowly coming death and the immutable deadline of the agreed date. No, my dear friend died, dare I say, on time, meeting the deadline, so to speak, and making my St Albans' friend a solemnly happy man, whose incredible efforts to organise a wonderful funeral party for our mutual friend weren't in vain...

Photosynthesis

These are two extremes of the Work and Dreams relationship; the first one being nearly daydreaming and the second, a triumph of pragmatism over everything else. You can ask how I make my way between those Scylla and Charybdis or how I wear my two hats - one of a writer and the second of the Head of the Central Asia and Caucasus service at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳.

We report from - and to - one of the most volatile regions of the world: revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, instability in Afghanistan, disputes between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and so on and so forth. Mentioning just headlines: energy hub of the future, potentially failed states, authoritarian rule, millions of migrants, the modern Great Drug Road, continuing torture in prisons, the most oppressed press - where is there a small space for dreams?

But as a biologist by training I say: look at the plants. During the day they take in toxic and poisonous carbon dioxide and with the help of energy from the sun they turn it, during the night, into life-giving oxygen. Isn't it the same with the creation of literature?

Throughout the course of my residency, I'll be exploring many different kinds of tensions - for example between journalism and literature, and between reporting and reflecting.

But for now, I would like to know how you strike the right balance between your daily work and the most human urge for creativity? Where do you place yourself between the folkloric hero Mullah Nasreddin and my pragmatic friend from St Albans?

Please write to me in 200 or less words. You can comment on this blog post or send an email to wir@bbc.co.uk.

And together, we'll try to reconcile this seemingly contradictory Work and Dreams relationship into a dream we all share, our Dream Work.