I was dreaming about walking on a beach. It wasn’t a “day at the beach” kind of dream; there was a definite undercurrent of foreboding. Something was about to happen.
But what was it?
I’ll never know. My phone pinged announcing a text message and that was the end of the story. My friends all know not to call or text me early in the morning, but they occasionally forget. It’s largely because for years I was a MORNING person — hitting the gym at 6am and running off to my office by 8:30. Now my office is in my apartment. My alarm goes off at 8, which makes sense because I rarely go to bed before midnight. I go to the gym at the civilized hour of 9, after checking my email and feeding the cat.
When my work schedule changed, my sleep scheduled changed and so did my prime dreamtime. All my life, I’ve remembered my dreams — two, three or more times a week…. I’m astonished when people say they never remember their dreams. It’s seems very sad. My dreams are like stories I tell myself. They don’t always make sense, but they are often insightful and sometimes they inspire short stories.
Do your dreams inspire your fiction?
The last hour of so before I wake up, when I hover between sleep and wakefulness, I often resolve plot problems in a novel or come up with an unexpected angle for a freelance assignment. Useful stuff!
So back to that beach —who or what was lurking? Was a giant wave about to devour the shore or would a mysterious stranger approach from the dunes? I hope I get back there tonight and find out.
We as writers are always dreaming of what to write next, our muses are most active when we sleep. They love to tease us by giving us wonderful ideas, knowing we’ll in all probability will forget them by the time we finally get up in the morning. It is for this reason I keep pen/paper on my night table, just is case an idea comes to me and I happen to wake up. If I do get up in the middle of the night with one such idea still in my head, I grab the pen/paper and right as much as I can before my mind becomes a blank. When I get around to typing more of my story, I pull out the notes I took, and hopefully I’ll be able to write what I’d dreamt about. I did this successfully only about three times during the course of writing my debut novel
Robin Leigh Morgan
Debut Author
“I Kissed a Ghost”
I keep a pad and pen by my bed too! Of course my middle of the night handwriting is even worse than my daytime so my scribbles are often illegible even to me! LOL… I often find that the dream filters back to me during the day and settles into the narrative of a story. By the time I get to the gym, it’s taking form and not necessarily the way it played out in the initial dream. Still the initial inspiration was the dream.
Dream On!
It has only been recently that my dreams have been profoundly remembered. I think it has more to do with the writing I have been doing of late, maybe my subconcious is working out the plot lines running through my head.
It rarely happens when I am working on non-fiction work. But when I am buried in fiction it becomes a dance between the dream and the page.
I like your image of a dance between the dream and the page. Yes, our subconscious is a rich playground for fiction. But, odd as it may seem, I often come up with key phrases or good angles for my freelance work — especially my newsletter projects and non-fiction ebooks. It is as if my subconscious wants a say in non-ficiton, too!
I seem to go through phases. Sometimes I dream a lot, very busy dreams from which I wake up feeling tired. And sometimes I’m hardly aware of dreaming at all.
At the moment I’m going through a quiet dream phase but I’m not complaining as I’m waking up refreshed! Then again I’m mostly just editing right now. Hmm… maybe dreams and creativity do go hand in hand.
Editing and no dreams, creating and dreams…. umm. An interesting connection!
Waking up refreshed sounds very good! Sometimes my dream-life is so active I need a dream vacation.
Giant squid. Waiting in the shallows. Or maybe that’s just me…. 🙂
Definitely worthy of foreboding!