Dream inspiration
Life 05/28/2003 |It’s six ten in the morning, and I’m awake. Awake enough that I don’t think I’ll be going to sleep again before my alarm goes off in about three hours. Ugh.
On the plus side, I’m awake because I just woke up from a very vivid dream that I think would make a kick-ass short story, so after I woke up I wrote down as much of it as I could remember, as fast as I could. I just hope that I’m not half-remembering something I’ve read before and thinking it’s an original idea, because if it is an original idea — I rock.
I’ll see how soon I can get it written up, though it may be a few days, I want to make this as good as possible. Hell, if I do find out that the inspiration came from someone else’s idea and not solely from my dreaming brain, I can always put an “inspired by” line in my story, right?
[See also: Sentenced to two life terms in bed? | Jim Steinman | Dilbert on Doocing | Tired of the ‘renovations’ | Romeo! Hey, doll! Where you at? ]
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3 Responses to “Dream inspiration”
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dang
Cheryl
Bertamum
Michael Hanscom
Snail_5
May 28th, 2003 at 7:53 am
Wow! I can’t wait to hear about this brilliant idea that got you out of bed at that hour!
May 28th, 2003 at 3:55 pm
If you can? set up your computer with a mike and record your thoughts after a dream, that way when it all goes away in an hour you can go back and listen to yourself when it was fresh. Writing is too slow and takes a lot of brain power away from your expressing your thoughts. Might help-might not? At any rate it sounds interesting. I’ll be waiting.
May 28th, 2003 at 6:25 pm
there have only been a few dreams i’ve had that i thought were powerful or interesting enough to write down. most of the time though, the beautiful thing about dreams is waking up from them - groggy and disconcerted - and remembering bits and pieces chaotically as your mind jostles the information into a reasonable pattern. the dream itself i usually find less than important (for myself) - but that action of mentally reviving something only half remembered is so powerful. because as soon as you try to force your mind into the logical patterns of waking hours, you begin to lose the story, the feelings, and the nuances your dream held. so you must find the balance between the two, living between them for only a moment, so that you can transfer one as much as possible to the other.
i had a very powerful dream a couple of years ago. it was very personal so i won’t discuss it. but when i woke up, i stumbled to my computer and wrote down the entire dream in a half-haze of sleep. I was conciously sleep-typing. I was perfectly balanced between the dream and the reality of my life, asleep enough to remember all the feelings and the fear and the small, seemingly insipid details, and awake enough only to type it out. I find that’s the best way - to just put it down, to quickly relive each moment and each feeling, so that you can later recognize the strange moments and the truth within them, and mull the whole thing over.