For Want of Words

In honor of January 13th being Make Your Dreams Come True Day, I want to challenge my writer friends to take steps toward making your writing goals come true. Author, Mary Shelley, was only 18 when the inspiration for a novel that would ultimately become a seminal work came to her in the form of a disconcerting dream-like vision about a mad chemist who created a weird human-like creature out of non-living matter. She set about to write a book based on her mirage. Two year later she published Frankenstein.

Oscar Wilde said, “They’ve promised that dreams can come true, but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams too.” Even those dreams that wake us up with our heart pounding and beads of sweat on our forehead can be used as a tool. Record or write down a description of a nightmare, then change that description in any way preferred, or describe a totally new desirable dream.

Responding creatively to experiences that initially provoke anxiety is health-giving. The very act of recording a dream can have the effect of improving future dream recall. 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 image he received in a dream of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. Mr. Tumnus, is that faun.

Perhaps your dreams have been boring lately. If so, choose to expose yourself to new experiences. New stimuli will make your dreams become exciting again. Whether writing for pleasure or profit, your dreams could be a gateway drug into published imagination. Stephen King is driven to tell stories as a way of allaying his many fears. He has addressed several over the years, including clowns, via It. In an interview with UK reporter Stan Nicholls, King said: "Like the ideas for some of my other novels, the inspiration for Misery came to me in a dream.

Happy Writing!