Tis the season for bloggers to recount their holiday celebrations with friends and family. This is not that blogger. Most readers don’t give a rat’s patoot what everybody else did, they just like talking about what they did. Snarky today, ain’t I? 😉
Let’s get to work have some fun.
Today we’re going to talk about dreams. In the early 1700’s Native Americans firmly believed dreams were our spirit ancestors trying to communicate with us. While in 1900 Germany, Dr Freud was cataloging his evaluations in his book Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). Freud was a psychoanalyst and believed dreams to be interpretations of the subconscious mind. Still others consider dreams to be mere psychobabble of our imaginations. Whatever you believe, as a writer, you cannot deny there is power in dreams.
As a child, I had such vivid and wonderous dreams as you would not believe. There were aliens, spaceships, flesh-eating lizards; princesses, dragons saving villages, princes trapped in mountain castles, and villains and heroes alike. They were full of color and pure imagination. Many of them became lost when I awoke, but when I started to write seriously in high school, I began recording my dreams for story material.
Clockwork Dreams, published in 2014, was based off a dream I had in 2013.
If you are a dreamer (of course you are, everybody dreams) who remembers their dreams (oh, drats), you have a plethora of stories at your fingertips just waiting to be written. Scratch those dreams down in the middle of the night or early morning light so you don’t forget. It’s amazing how well you will recall the dream if you can at least record key notes. I currently have a notebook (guarded by Captain Jack Sparrow and William Turner) which I keep at my bedside, and it spans about eight years of dreams.
Sadly, now that I’m an adult, I don’t remember my dreams. Even if I do, I find they are far too realistic to every-day-life (only horrible! Riddled with angst and stress and running late for work!) Sometimes my dreams are too abstract to decipher. I haven’t written down a dream in a long while. (Although I did have this one dream in which I was a Timelord trying to rescue a girl from a time-loop monster that was posing as the girl’s mother. Then I got stuck in a time-loop. Oh, the irony. And just when I was about to free the girl and unravel the web that the monster had created, I woke up!)
Where was I?
Collect your dreams, my friends. Writing down horrific dreams can be therapeutic, and recording the good ones can give you a smile later on. Either way, you can gleen wonderful stories from your dreams.
My next novel, Legacy of the Wolf Wind, is based off a dream I had ages ago. It took me over three years to write in order to unravel such a complicated dream mystery.
There’s my word of advice. See you next time!
This has been,
Fanny T. Crispin
Written Things 