Author Dreams

Waking up from bad dreams is difficult. It's a lot like waking up and peeling the mind away. It's like sleeping but never actually allowing the mind to rest. It's getting entangled in another world, another place, yet the mind only knows it as real. In my dreams last night there was thunder outside my bedroom door, lightening flashing purple, blue, and green. Ghosts awaited me an a twisting staircase. There was something more about land and people, but the dream is quickly fading. And, knowing it was an unpleasant dreams, far I can still taste the emotions it triggered, I say let it fade.

It will dissolve into the morning and I will just be left with the feelings it created. They will stay with me all day like a whisper that preset my mood. My eyes will get splashed with makeup to hide the dark circles underneath, and my headache will be soothed with coffee and over the counter pain pills.

When I awoke from my dream of thunder, it was no surprise it is cloudy and appears to have just stopped raining outside. I know I could not have really heard thunder, because it's too cold for that here. We get a lot of things from our weather, but thunder storms is not one of them. Yet, I do think bits of reality stain our minds as we sleep and leak over into our dreams. I suppose that's why so many people study the meanings of dreams and assign more context to an otherwise illogical world.

I know the meanings of my dreams. I always have. I can trace back each item to the day and tell you what caused it. If it's an anxiety dream, I can also tell you what it is about or revealing. But, the truth is, most of my dreams are just the active part of my mind telling stories inspired by whatever media I was consuming lately or exciting place I was visiting. There's no deeper emotional label to the majority of the dreams that visit me. Just unfiltered story.

These stories told to me in sleep reflect much of what I write in wake with their genres. Dreams, of course, never have great logic or consistent rules. I wonder after a stint of successfully writing horror for a while, if authors like Stephen King are plagued by the same visiting of their creations. Did fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis dream of exciting wars and adventures? Did he dream of beautiful creatures and wake up yearning for more? Did Anne McCaffrey dream of flying dragons? Do we all create in our sleep, and some of us just not recall it?

So many of us writers employ dreams as useful messaging to the main characters of our stories. Usually when I read a dream sequence, I have a breif moment of thinking I can tell if the author dreams a lot themselves. Some just don't know how to capture that feeling of dissorientation and turmoil. But, perhaps it's a reflection that most people just have quick abstract dreams they forget. How many authors actually have dreams like the ones they require their protagonist to have?

According to studies, only 2%-8% of the adult population has nightmares. It would make sense that when an author is gifting such a thing to a character in their story, the author would be drawing upon childhood memories or imagining it. But, dreams can be anything and so few of have nightmares that who would really know if it was wrong? Are their rules for how we should write dreams?

It's usually the details of characters dreams that get to me. Their dreams have too few things off, too much of it matches the real world of the character. Dreams usually have little indicators they are false. An extra door somewhere, a forest where there isn't one. It's as if the brain can't quite map out what reality looked like and it's inventing details. But, I suppose that's my own dreams, and I have never met another vivid dreamer to discuss those things with. Despite studies indicating that 80% of adults remember their dreams, I have never met an adult that recollects beyond the fact that they had a dream and whatever it's main theme was.

I am usually jealous of those people. Often, I wish I slept deep enough to leave the dreams buried. I asked my mother about my dreaming the other day and if it ever rattled her that she had a child that woke her up from nightmares so frequently. She said she was the same way as a kid so no. However, she grew out of it, and I didn't. I'm left here with horrid stories to write from my nightmares and with some newfound way to be cruel to my characters when they sleep, I suppose. But, when I can just play pretend and imagine these things anyway, is the personal experience really making that profound of an impact? I'm sure somewhere out there is a study on how much of our sleep patterns are inherited, but alas, it's time to prepare my coffee and conclude these thoughts. The sun is creeping up and whatever ghosts there may be are being sent back to bed.