They dress appropriately for the weather. They cook and eat wholesome organic meals. They seem to understand that when going to writing group, it's generally useful to bring a writing utensil. They keep dream journals.
I mentioned the dream journals to my therapist last month. (No, I'm not in therapy for anything deep-seated and intriguing. I was hoping that would be the case, but it turns out it's just a garden variety case of not having my shit together. My therapist is not very interested in talking about my existential ennui. She is very interested in talking about how it's "helpful" to make a grocery list before going to the store and how it might be "reassuring" for me to choose my work outfit the night before.)
"The problem is, though, I don't dream." I told her. "It must be all that wholesome organic food they eat. Which means that dreaming is kind of classist, don't you think?"
She ignored me and then proceeded to explain that actually, I don't dream because I don't get enough sleep. Apparently dreams occur in REM cycles, but when we only sleep for a couple of hours, we spend most of our bed time in deeper, dreamless, non-REM sleep.
I slurped my evening coffee and conceded that yes, perhaps going to bed earlier would be helpful and reassuring.
After a couple of weeks of settling into a bed a bit earlier, I started dreaming regularly. I now wake tangled in strange and lovely images that demand a glazed earthen mug of organic coffee and a pen of flowing ink and hand-pressed paper to write on. Unfortunately, I usually wake up 15 minutes before I have to leave the house. It's all I can do to get eye boogers off of my face while my husband takes the dog out and makes the coffee.
Even though I don't have the luxury of describing my dreams in detail and pondering their meaning each morning, I don't want to give up on those images entirely, and you shouldn't either. It doesn't matter what your dreams mean. On a personal level, it may matter very much, but as writers, that's not what we're interested in. As writers, our brains have done creative work for us while we were sleeping, and it's just craziness not to use that. The carefully-constructed metaphors and haunting descriptions that we toil over during our waking hours? Yeah, our subconscious bakes up a little bit of that every night, without us having to really do anything. As Blondie once said, dreaming is free. Take advantage of it.
Every morning, I stagger into the bathroom with my iPhone. Once I've got my toothbrush in my mouth, I use the notes application on my phone to quickly jot down my dream. Now I have a tiny storehouse of roller coasters on fire, live puppies buried in a field as a test of human nature (I know, what?), and a grandmother wolf with blue glass eyes. I haven't used anything yet, but NaNoWriMo seems as good a time as any to set a roller coaster on fire.
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