Have you ever wondered what a strange, odd or just plain silly dream meant? I’ve had a few weird recurring dreams. Some I can only recall random pieces of, others flow through my brain like a mental movie (complete with rolling credits!). Perhaps your dreams have been boring lately. If so, choose to expose yourself to new experiences throughout the day. Dreaming allows our subconscious to process the day’s events. New stimuli will make your dreams become exciting once again.
Regurgitating one’s subconscious on paper may seem tedious or even ridiculous, but many a midsummer night’s dream or winter’s tale have given birth to narration. C. S. Lewis said that the famous Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, came to him from a single picture he received in a dream, of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. Mr. Tumnus, in Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia (1949), is that faun.
It pays to keep a notebook near your bed so you are able to write down an inspiring thought or a funny dream you had. If you’re like me, those shimmering images won’t linger long in the light of day. However, there are exceptions. Stephenie Meyer's life changed dramatically on June 2, 2003. The stay-at-home mother of three young sons woke up from a dream featuring seemingly real characters that she could not get out of her head.
She says, "Though I had a million things to do, I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn't done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering."
Meyer invented the plot during the day through swim lessons and potty training, and wrote it out late at night when the house was quiet. Three months later she finished her first novel,which eventually made its way to the publishing company Little, Brown Book Group where everyone fell immediately in love with Meyer’s gripping, star-crossed lovers.
Inspiration for a poem or song can also come by way of a dream. Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the tune for yesterday in his head. He jumped out of bed and played it instantly on his piano, and is quoted as saying, “It was just all there, a complete thing, I couldn’t believe it”.
Because of the way that Paul had dreamed up the song he was very concerned that it may have been a tune he had heard previously. He spent the next month driving people mad by asking them if they had heard the tune to yesterday before.
The song was originally titled Scrambled Eggs and contained the lyrics “Scrambled eggs, oh you’ve got such lovely legs”. He used to practice the song relentlessly because he loved it so. Despite this, it took many weeks until he came up with the lyrics for yesterday while on holiday with Jane Asher in Portugal .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan immediately on waking from a laudanum-induced dream. The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry. A copy of the manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Museum in London. Whether writing for pleasure or profit, your dream log could be a gateway drug into published imagination. Keep it daily if you value the idea of being a writer, for no good writer throws away a good tool.
Happy Writing!
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