Dreams are answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.
~X-Files
Dreams have long fascinated us. We do research to understand how they come about and what they mean. Dreams have inspired scientist, artist, inventors and philosophers since the beginning of time.
Dreams inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s masterpieces Kubla Khan and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
Many of Robert Louis Stevenson’s best stories came from dreams. As did many of the stories and poems of Edgar Allen Poe.
Do you remember your dreams? Are you in touch with this extraordinary resource? If you don’t remember them, there are plenty of books and websites to give you advice about how you go about remembering your dreams. Also check out a technique called lucid dreaming if you’re not familiar with this practice.
Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.
~Marsha Norman
Dreams are a great resource on multiple levels. Dreams can bring us self discovery, ways to work out issues, create new characters, play out scenes or develop plots, build settings, explore moods, and anything else you can dream on.
Bottom line: pay attention to your dreams. They are your creative efforts at their finest.
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power,
which if it were available in waking,
would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.
~H.F. Hedge
Question for today: How do you use your dreams in your writing life? (And if you don’t – how might you begin doing this?)
Best Wishes,
June
joni
Feb 03, 2010 @ 19:39:38
Wow! First the Ghost Stories with Dayana and now the dreams with June. I wonder what all of this is trying to tell me? teeheehee
I always remember my dreams since I was a kid I taught myself techniques on how to remember them and what to dream!When I become awake and aware of my dream, in a fog like manner, sometimes I’ll sit and write and it will be something of the eerie nature, I can bet you that. 🙂
Stories are born in the dream state and only when we are cognizant can we really write and realize it was within us the whole time.
Nice post! 🙂
joni
p.s. I posted my
400th blog post today! 🙂
liveyourwritingdream
Feb 03, 2010 @ 19:52:50
…and I replied to your 400th post! Congratulations, Joni!
🙂
You are so in touch with your dreams and what they can do for your writing. Next step? Do you do lucid dreaming?
It’s a helpful technique to know.
Take care,
June
Ana Rush
Feb 03, 2010 @ 21:26:50
DREAMS
I believe in dreams very much. I think all dreams are true to some extent because they tell us important things about our inner life that we are afraid of ,sacred of facing or are denying that they exist within ourselves.
Many writers have written about dreams but maybe, for me ,the most important is the psychologist, Sigmund Freud when he speaks of the unconscious. I think we usually don’t allow our dreams, our unconscious dreams to come to the surface or to our conscious mind because they are usually, though not always, painful and we tend ,at least I do, to escape from what makes us suffer not realizing that the answer to many things in our lives are there.
Sometimes it is just a word, an image, a feeling, a person we haven’t seen for a long time, or someone who has done us a bad turn. At times dreams are incomprehensible, like a puzzle, we must learn to order, organize, maybe to understand.
What do I do with my dreams? I don’t use them to write but I do use them to understand what I am feeling, why I am feeling like that. Most importantly, I use them to understand myself.
I think it would be very useful ,helpful and
creative to start writing about what I dream, no matter whether it is a word, image, sound(sometimes I cry during my dream),movement, anything.
Wonderful post, June. I loved it. I believe very much in the processes of the mind/brain as all kinds of associations come to me.
Best,
Ana
liveyourwritingdream
Feb 04, 2010 @ 08:22:36
I love your response, Ana, and hope you’ll explore different ways that you might use dreams in your writing process. Capturing our dreams in some form can be enlightening.
The mind is awesome in how it operates, and dreams are but one area to delve into. I love reading research on what is being discovered where the mind and dreams are concerned.
I’m thinking I might expand on this idea of how to use dreams in our writing but don’t know yet what form that might take.
Take care,
June
Ana Rush
Feb 04, 2010 @ 09:54:31
Thanks,June.Maybe a way to use them in writing is using the technique of FREE ASSOCIATION.I use them in my classes, generally with pictures they must draw.I provide them with a word or thought.At other times,I use a book called “The mind’s Eye” which is meant for teaching but it is very good and the pictures are quite strange and they must imagine what is depicted in the pictures. The students like the aCTIVITY VERY MUCH.
BEST,
aNA
liveyourwritingdream
Feb 04, 2010 @ 12:12:06
Great ideas for working with students, Ana!
May I come be in your class? 🙂
Take care,
June
Ana Rush
Feb 04, 2010 @ 21:20:37
You are certainly welcome,June, though a little bit far.
Best,
Ana
🙂