Thursday, March 12, 2015

Dreams and the Written Word

As a writer I get my ideas from pretty much anywhere in my life - this includes my dreams.  So, I have about three or four Dream Journals I keep; along with two rather large Dream Dictionaries in my bedside table.

I have found that the best story ideas come from dreams which are either very weird, really scary or so off-the-planet and vivid, I wonder exactly what I've been eating the night before.  And often the best dreams are the ones that stay with me for days afterwards; and are the most detailed as well.

However, the weirdest ones are also the repetitive dreams.  I've had one lot of dreams where I kept on dreaming about a blue house.  It was the same house I dreamed of over about two months and I felt really strange about it after waking up and writing about it... honestly I felt as though my dream world was becoming a broken record of blue houses.  I stopped watching 'Dr Who' and I tried to keep from wearing too much blue as well... but the dreams kept on coming.  And I kept on writing them down.  Then, one day, the Blue House Dreams stopped - much to my relief - and I had other dreams which were just as strange, but had nothing to do with blue houses.  After about three months, I had a great story idea, but nothing to base it on.  So, out came my dream journals about the Blue House; and 'Another World Away' was created.  It took me ages to write about it and I had to find the house I was dreaming about on Google.. and you wanna know something?  That damned house actually existed!  Talk about creepy!  But I was relieved that the house I dreamed about was real, and not something my brain cooked up.

Since that collection of dreams, I've found a lot of my dreams have been turned into stories, poems and flash fictions.  It's fun to do and seeing the dreams are just something my brain cooks up from the day's proceedings, it's harmless fun.  So, what do you do with your dreams - if you remember them?  Do you do what I do with them?  Or do you just write a story just from your imagination ... like I do most of the time?  Until my next post, happy reading.

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