The Power of Dreams

I'm a great believer in the power of dreams. Have had many which have told me truths about myself that I hadn't got round to facing. Have had others which have told me the truth about relationships I was in. (I wish I had listened more carefully.) Have recognised a soul-mate from a dream and wasn't wrong. Was told in another that someone needed my help even before my waking self had recognised it.

I write my dreams down as soon as I wake, because I know they are important.

I keep dipping into Naomi Epel's book Writer's Dreaming, and in fact have used extracts from it on my course where I do a writing-from-dream-exercise.



Epal interviewed 26 writers about their dreams and their creative process what is facinating is how many of the writers featured have used dreams to help them in their work. Many more writers talk about entering a "dream-like state" when they write.

William Styron saw the heroine of his novel in a "waking vision" standing in a hallway of a boarding house in Flatbush, a number tattoed on her arm.



And Bharati Mukherjee (a writer I was lucky enough to meet not long ago) has dreamed the endings to stories and to her novel Jasmine. She says:

As I'm getting to the end of a story, the ending that, during my waking hours, I think will happen is sometimes subverted or obliterated by the dream. It happens as I'm just about to write that scene. ... In many of the stories in The Middleman, the endings are not the way I had planned them.

(The Middleman is one of the best collections of short-fiction I've ever read. Just don't know how Mukherjee can get so far into the heads of all these so different characters ...)



Just for fun, dear readers, here's a little quiz for you. A famous writer had the following dream. At the time that Epel's book went to print, this writer had not yet used the material in his writing. Later it became the basis of a novel.

Now then, can you name the writer and the novel. (Anyone who has done my course is not allowed to answer!) First prize as usual is to buy me lunch.

I don't have repetitive dreams but I do have an anxiety dream: I'm working very hard in this hot little room where I lived as a teenager - and I'm aware that there's a madwoman in th attic. There's a little tiny door under the eave that goes to the attic and I have to finish my work. I have to get that work done or she'll come and get me. At some point in this dream that door always bursts open and this hideous woman - with all this white hair stuck up around her head like a gone-to-seed dandelion - jumps out with a scapel.

And I wake up.

I still have that dream when I'm backed up on my work and trying to fill all these ridiculous commitments I've made for myself.