One morning I woke up with a start. I checked my leg thoroughly for bite-marks. There were none. Yet, I felt like getting a vaccine for rabies, just to be safe. I had dreamt of being bitten by a rabid dog. The dream was so vivid that I had a hard time convincing myself that I had not been bitten by a dog.
We all dream. Even though we dream every night, we are usually not able to remember our dreams when we wake up. There are exceptions, however, when we are able to remember our dreams, and, sometimes, these dreams feel so real, so fantastic, that one has the feeling of living through an adventure.
If we pay close attention to our dreams, they can inspire us to write a story, a poem, or a novel based on them. Over the years I have had so many dreams that I feel could have been turned into really interesting pieces of writing, but that has never happened.
There are two main reasons, I feel, why our dreams don’t get translated into stories.
The first reason is that we tend to start forgetting our dreams as soon as we wake up. The more time we spend awake without trying to remember the dream, the more we forget it. In a few hours we hardly remember the dream, however fantastic it might have been. The solution is to write down the dream as soon as we wake up.
The second reason is that we don’t give enough credit to our dreams. The dreams seem childish, especially because the world of dreams follows no rules, no laws of physics, no guidelines of any religion, and no restrictions of the society. We may feel that anyone can have a dream like that, and that is true to some extent. But that is where our role as the writer comes in. The dream is merely the seed of an idea that we have to water so that it can turn into a fruit bearing tree.
If you do not agree with me about turning dreams into creative masterpieces, let me quote a few examples to change your mind (source: wikipedia)
1. Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the plot of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde during a dream.
2. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was inspired by a dream at Lord Byron’s villa.
3. British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” after finding inspiration from an opium induced dream.
4. Aphex Twin wrote much of the music on his album Selected Ambient Works Volume II by going to sleep in the studio, and then recreating the sounds he heard in dreams as soon as he woke up.
So, the next time you remember an interesting dream, don’t let it be forgotten. Write it down. Who knows your dream may be the inspiration for your magnum opus.
(image courtesy: carin from sxc.hu)
I just read a similar article on The Kill Zone website. A couple people remarked they have dreamed entire plots to books. Wow. My dreams, the ones I remember, are always such a vivid working out of my emotional state, I’d be embarrassed to write about them! Have you written a story or captured ideas for stories before from yours?
@Julie I have never actually done that. I have had some weird and strange dreams in the past few days that I feel can translate into some interesting stories. I will definitely try to use some of my dreams in my future stories.
Nicely put :-)! I remember reading somewhere that it was this vivid dream of the whole internet ‘getting into’ a desktop that gave Larry Page the initial idea about designing Google as a search engine with a difference, though there were ~15 other prior to Google.