If one advances in the direction of his
dreams, he will meet with success
unsuspected in waking hours.
~
Henry Thoreau
Dreams are a writer’s best friend for more reasons
than one. Like our hearts that never stop pumping, our brains never stop
working. Synaptic connections throughout our bodies are constantly in play
keeping the electrical charge of life shooting like lightning bolts. Those
connections also fire through our brains in an automated creative storm. Dreams
are our productions centers, telling us stories for our own good. They are a rich part of everyone’s life,
waiting to be discovered.
For centuries, dreams have played a factor in every
culture. From the ancients who thought them messages from gods and demons to
Carl Jung who considered them tools for learning about ourselves and reaching
our potentials. We have learned that dreams play a varied and active role in
our lives. The mere fact that we dream is good for us. They help keep our lives
in balance and support mental health.
In the studies by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene
Asserinsky at the University of Chicago in the last century, we first learned
of the physiology of dreams. They introduced us to REM sleep. Rapid eye
movement that occurs when people–and most other animals–dream. REM studies
reveal that we watch our dream visions in much the same way we watch a running
movie while we are awake.
Your dreams can tell you how you really feel about
your mate, how to solve your problems, and in some cases, they reveal the
future. For writers, they can actually plot out entire book scenarios if we
learn to harness their power. The best person to figure out the meaning behind
your dreams is you. To do that, you must train yourself to remember your dreams
and interpret them. There are tons of dream dictionaries on the market. Find
one you like to help you understand the symbols and meaning. But before you can
do this, you have to remember your dreams. There is no big trick to this.
Writers
Write
For some, it doesn’t need to be said; but for others,
it does. Keep a Dream Journal. The first step to harnessing the
power of your dreams is to write them down. By doing so on a regular basis, you
will begin to recall more and more details. The best was to do this is to
follow a routine.
1. Keep
your dream journal at your bedside for easy access. Knowing it is there will
help your remember dreams. You may even want to use it in the middle of the
night, so don’t forget the pen/pencil.
2. Tell
yourself several times a day that you intend to remember your dream.
3. Just
before you go to sleep, after you are relaxed, tell yourself, “When I awaken, I
will remember and write down my dream.
4. Place
a bag of aromatic herbs near your pillow as a reminder that your will remember
your dream. The scent will soon be associated with both dreams and recalling
them. (On a side note, we know that scents, temperatures, etc. can enter our
dreams from the real world. They can also affect the mood and response we have
to them physically).
5. Drink
a glass of water before you go to sleep. Avoid Alcohol and other drugs that suppress
REM.
6. If
you are trying to solve a problem, write it down before you go to sleep. This
may inspire your dream world to solve your problem.
7. Don’t
jump right out of bed in the morning. Don’t open your eyes. Lie still and focus
on remembering your dream. How did it make you feel? Did it leave you with a
certain mood? Who was in your dream? Did the people have faces? Did they remind
you of anyone? (Keep in mind that dreams have their own symbols and language. A
person in your dream may not necessarily be that person in reality. You may
dream about Henry VIII and in reality your mind is addressing issues you have
about someone you feel has undue and unjust power over you in your waking
world.) Where did your dream take place? Have you ever been there? Did it
remind you of a place familiar to you? Did anything in your dream remind you of
something from real life?
8. As
soon as you sit up, grab that journal. Even if you remember only a small part
of the dream that makes no sense, write it down anyway. The more you do this,
the more you will remember and the better you will become at recording your
dreams.
9. Start
with the date you had the dream.
10. Give
the dream a title to make it easy to retrieve.
11. Write
in the present tense and not the past tense to keep the story flowing.
Punctuation and grammar do not matter here. This is not for an editor or agent
or even a critique partner. It is for you alone.
Your conscious mind may not know a good idea if it
bites you on the nose. Your subconscious mind can take an idea and create a
literary masterpiece.
Desperate for money and not knowing where his next
meal would come from, Robert Louis Stevenson fell into a fitful sleep. He awoke
relaxed and refreshed and immediately set about writing one of his classics, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You can do the
same thing. You can pull from your subconscious while sleeping and find the
missing elements in your characters and plots.
Remember when I spoke of capturing skills in
relation to creativity? Dream capture is one of the most
important things you can do for your writing life. Studying the things you jot
down might do more than give you story ideas, it may solve real life problems.
You
can also influence your dreams. With a little guidance
they will give you the answers you want. Think of your brain as a computer–data
in, data out. The data out depends on the data programmed into it. By
instructing your mind to solve a problem just before you go to sleep, your
dreams will soon start doing this for you.
Suppose you are working on a plot. Everything is
falling into place and wham, you somehow got from point C to point F, but no
matter how hard you try, your waking mind won’t let you figure out how it
happened–point D and point E are mysteries.
When you go to bed, let yourself drift off to sleep
thinking about the plot, keeping in mind you’re looking for missing
information.
You may dream your entire plot as a movie in your
mind. In some cases, you may not only pick up the missing plot points, but you
might actually find other elements that enhance your story. Sometimes the only
way to find the next right answer is through our dreams.
Dreams are an
important and big topic within the creative mind. For that reason, I’ve decided
to split it up. I’ll address lucid dreams, and daydreams.
Those are areas where your creative muses will love to play. Until then, happy writing!Oh, and one small plug. February 2, 2015 is the release date for my next book, The Strangclyf Secret.
4 comments:
Virtually all my SF have evolved or were seeded by dreams.
Michael Davis (Davisstories.com)
Author of the Year (2008 and 2009)
Award of Excellence (2012)
The main turning point in the story that became An Alien's Guide to World Domination came to me in a dream. I am always eager to remember and mine this source of imagination.
Great advice, Mary. I'm going to print this information off for future use. Several of my ideas have come from dreams. One scene in Bolt Action, my entire book The Dream House Visions and Nightmares is based on a recurring dream I've had since childhood.
Dreams keep us sane. They are certainly helpful in keeping us writers sane.
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