Dream journaling is that staple of creativity-enhancing courses that I’ve always skipped in the past. Honestly, my dreams are just not as interesting or coherent as the stories I come up with when awake. They largely involve me neglecting to study or show up for classes and thereby failing the Super Important Exam That Determines The Rest of My Life–Dum Da Dum! (gee, no, I’m not reliving the anxiety associated with my academic career, no sirree!).
But, I thought dream journaling might be a fun experiment for a couple weeks. I haven’t been recording daily, but here’s what I’ve gleaned from my badly-scribbled morning notes:
1. I actually dream every night. In fact, I have at least two, possibly more, distinct dreams.
2. I dream quite frequently about being in a house FULL of rooms. Rooms upon rooms upon rooms. In the latest iteration of that dream, we were staying with some friends whose decent-sized house had turned into a MANSION of high-ceilinged rooms with huge floor-to-ceiling windows. And I was creeping around this house in the middle of the night to meet with a spy (I know that plot point comes straight from Quartz!).
In other versions of this theme, our house has been many many times larger than it really is. Considering that we’ve had to remodel this place room by room, I was not thrilled by being confronted with rooms full of peeling wallpaper, asbestos-backed linoleum and ancient bathrooms with rusty claw-footed tubs. In one dream, house also had a porch exactly like David’s rental when he was bachelor and a side alley exactly like the one of my childhood home…
3. My dreams are also populated by people I barely know: moms I meet while waiting for my kids to be done with gymnastics/dance/swimming, old high school acquaintances I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. They often play major roles, which accounts for some of the bemusement I often feel in my dreams.
4. In some of my dreams I am me. And in others, I am someone else, like a bubbly college student (that was last night), some blonde(!) named Ivy/Evy, or a character in a MWT novel being chased up endless spiral stairs by Roman soldiers.
5. So far, I have not found anything that is the least bit useful for fiction writing. In fact, the only dream I can remember that inspired a story idea is one that David had. Which I appropriated because he’s not doing anything with it.
Do you dream journal? What kinds of dreams do you have? Do they help with your creative process, or coping mechanisms, in any way that you can tell?
I record any dreams that feel important or at least coherent, but I have to be honest, they aren’t fodder for stories. Growing up, I was taught that dreams have meaning and are “lines of probability.” They mean something about the path that I am on and whether I want to stay on that path.
Dream staples for me include the tiger that chases me (the long-impressed idea that I’m an incapable weakling), houses in and out of time (considered assignments, houses, or people), and frequently dreams where I am being chased or hunted for special gifts (maybe an overflow from all the SFF I read—I’m very fond of stories featuring special powers, etc.).
I’ve been myself or others in my dreams. I’ve seen stuff in dreams about relationships that actually play out in my life. I’ve had dreams about things regarding my writing or my work that happen exactly as depicted or that don’t because I worked to change the possibility.
Because of the heavy weight given to interpretation in my life, it’s tough to even consider using my dreams as stories, though I’ve had a LOT of fodder for doing so if I could stomach it.
I used to keep a daily dream journal when I was in college, kept it going for like two yeas, but I just got plain tired of doing it because it took so much time every morning (or middle of the night). Nowadays, I only record the memorable dreams. I usually have crazy adventure dreams, with lots of action. Most are linear and coherent. I got a whole novel from one tiny section of one dream (though the funny thing is that bit was removed in the re-write, but it still inspired the book.) Have used images from other dreams in short stories.
Your house dreams are fascinating! I used to have recurring house dreams, but they always involved the house being partly open-air, or having grass instead of carpet. My most frequent recurring dreams involve saving fish. Usually big koi, but it varies. They’re running out of water for one reason or another, and I’m always trying to either move them to a different pond or bring them water. Odd. No idea what it represents, and when I dream it, it doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I’m doing in real life.
*nod* I grew up with the notion that dreams meant something, too, though I’ve grown out of that. Horses, for example, were meant to be good luck (or signs that great wealth was about to come our way). There was a time I dreamt a lot about water, which are squicky dreams for me, because I have this ludicrous fear of dropping one of my children into the Niagara Falls or something horrible like that!
Deb,
Yes, recording dreams in exhaustive detail can become quite boring. I take a few minutes each morning to think about what I dreamt and I will only record if it is memorable in some way. I have no idea what the saving koi could mean! That is an odd theme. have you googled it to see if someone has dreamed up an interpretation for that? 😀
Hi Rabia,
Robert Moss has written a number of books on the subject of dreams and I’ve joined his dream forum online.
The things I’ve learned about how to work with dreams and how they can relate to waking life are fascinating!
Lisa,
I’d be interested in hearing what you’ve picked up. Maybe it could be a subject of a post on your blog?