Dreamwalking Your Writing
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
Do you remember your dreams? Do you use them as jumping-off points for your writing?
When I ask this question, I get a variety of responses:
“I don’t remember my dreams.”
“It’s all too jumbled. I don’t remember anything clearly.”
“It doesn’t make any sense anyway.”
“I’m scared about what might come up in there.”
“I don’t dream.”
Some people, myself included, do utilize dream material for writing. Few make a conscious effort to do so, however. If an image or dream hits with particular clarity, it might find its way into a poem or story. Many people find it too cumbersome to write down their dreams, or get frustrated that they don’t remember all the details.
But dreams are a direct pipeline to our subconscious. This is where our imagination lives. It’s the imaginations, paired with conscious craft, that creates the stories, poems, films, and art that we love.
As such, they can be a wonderful way to access your creativity.
They can:
Jumpstart a poem or story
Help solve story problems
Allow greater ease and flow of your creativity
Help make connections you hadn’t thought of
Access your intuition
Give impetus to nonlinear play and experimentation in your writing
It starts with being able to remember your dreams, or at least fragmentary images. If you have trouble remembering anything of your dreams, you can tell yourself before you go to sleep: “Tonight I will remember my dreams.” Repeat this at least three times.
It may take several nights of doing this before you have much to remember. This also depends on how tired you are, and other factors like the temperature of the room. Just relax into it, and don’t stress if you don’t start remembering right away.
Of course, the next step is moving the dream content from your mind to the page. You may think you will remember it upon fully waking, but most of us don’t, at least until we practice quite a lot. If I have a particularly strong dream or sequence of dreams, sometimes I can “imprint” images on my mind. The other night, for example, I had “luggage, gift, food, white fox.” I forgot many details but remembered enough to write several pages when I fully awoke and went to my journal.
One idea is to keep a dream journal and good pen by your bed. This should be a notebook that you don’t mind getting messy. Perhaps spiral-bound, where you can keep it open to the next blank page. I write in the dark, capturing as much as I can before fully waking. I don’t worry about grammar, straight lines, spelling, or full sentences.
In the morning, I review the material. Sometimes I don’t remember what I thought was so meaningful and important! Other times certain phrases or images inspire a poem, or even a novel, as with the one that inspired a middle grade novel I wrote. The dream image became the crisis moment of the story, and I wrote the story around that point.
You might keep a dream symbol book nearby. Some good options are:
Man and His Symbols by C.G. Jung: Explores archetypes and the collective unconscious to help decode deep symbolic images.
The Complete A to Z Dictionary of Dreams by Ian Wallace
The Dream Interpretation Handbook by Karen Frazier
Psychologist World: https://www.psychologistworld.com/dreams/dictionary/
These can help you explore some of the deeper meanings of your dreams, but remember, dreams are highly individual. Sometimes a meaning will jump out at you, but other times the description won’t resonate at all. You may build your own “dream dictionary,” especially if you have recurring dreams. One family member keeps showing up in my dreams, and I have figured out since he is an engineer, with a logical, straightforward mind, he usually shows up when I’m perplexed and need to hear a straightforward solution to a dream problem, or an “oh, duh” moment.
You may have recurring people, places, events, or themes in your dreams. If you can find (and pay for) a Jungian analyst, you may mine some amazing dream material! But simply becoming more familiar with your unconscious mind by paying attention to your dreams will give you a wealth of creative inspiration.
The next step is to lucid dream, meaning you know you are dreaming and can in some way manipulate the dream. Getting and staying in a lucid dream state is easy for some people, difficult for others. The easiest time to lucid dream is when you are not deeply asleep. Early in the morning or during a nap are good times for me. I am working on becoming lucid while dreaming at night, but I keep waking myself up as soon as I realize I’m in a dream!
With lucid dreams, you have the best chance of remembering them when you wake. They are especially good for solving story problems. You can mull over the problem as you drift off, and let the unconscious guide you from there. The key word is let. Don’t try to control it, or "figure it out.”
What to do about nightmares? I find that as I become more focused on remembering dreams, or lucid dreaming, I have more control in terms of waking myself from nightmares. If all this truly disrupts your sleep and makes you afraid or brings up trauma, then definitely don’t do it, unless you are under the care of a therapist. Sometimes it’s merely a matter of physical discomfort bleeding into your unconscious mind (being too hot, or having indigestion are two of my nightmare-triggers). And, it may bring up something you really need to pay attention to in waking life.
“Dreaming in the Bardo”
I wander gray empty corridors
Upstairs
And down
Seeking:
Knowledge
Companionship
Voices echo in the distance
An Escher painting of ceaseless roaming
without connection
A bardo of dream
Always searching
for home
If you like this, head on over to the Contact Page and sign up to get my monthly newsletter featuring tips on creativity, productivity, and the writer’s craft.
