Image by 0fjd125gk87 from Pixabay
The Dream Diary as a Writers' Tool
Keeping a dream diary is an invaluable tool in the writer's arsenal of mechanisms to create that spark, that tiny flash that kindles a carefully constructed timber pile into the fire of creation.
It may be unwise for many, as I am doing, to make this dream diary public, as once expressed outwardly to the world, ideas and characters, plot devices etc can lose their immediacy, but I don't really think this is the case with the dream diary. I believe this rule to hold true in not talking about, or over-sharing your creative writing (outside of a dedicated creative critique group) with the world before it has reached a final draft.
Keeping a dream diary is more about collecting what seem disparate elements from your subconscious that can be channeled into your creative writing, enriching it and sometimes even - if you are lucky - inspiring whole pieces from one night's dream sequences.
As I understand it - and was taught at university - a dream diary can be a powerful catalyst for two things:
Often catharsis comes from habitually writing down your dreams and analysing/understanding their meaning. With catharsis comes a better understanding of yourself, and with this comes a more honest fiction flowing from your pen/keys. It can literally help you find your voice - that elusive style or turn of phrase that makes you fall in love with a particular author or story. That is a sign of a writer who has found their writer's voice. It is rarely seen in people who aren't professional writers.
If like me, you dream vividly, the content of your dreams - especially after weeks of recording them - can form repeating themes, and characters that can be crafted into short stories or longer works of fiction. This is the magic of recording your subconscious, or to put it more accurately, illuminating small snippets of what your subconscious wishes to share with you, and occasionally, I believe, when you're lucky elements of a greater force that Jung wrote about called the collective unconscious might pop into your dreams.
A Few Tips for More Easily Keeping Dream Diary
First, write immediately upon waking as much as you can remember. Often dreams will come in disjointed scenes, but there are usually gaps between one rough narrative and the next.
Secondly, the reason for writing immediately upon waking is that many writers (well at least for myself) wake sporadically during the morning, which might actually be something I developed unconsciously. But for example, waking at say 6 am and then sleeping again until 8 am will mean the dreams in those 2 hours will be vivid and easily remembered. For me, this isn't really a massive issue as I remember 5-6 dreams/night and often worry that I am missing out on enough REM cycle sleep as a result. But still, those final dreams in the early hours of the morning are the ones where I can remember specific sensory details, such as the feel of the air, the smell of hair or - as you will see in my dream diary - the feeling of scooping up a net of fish. I've found that it is only in these final hours of dreaming where I dream as vividly as if it were waking life, which can be a little disconcerting, and upsetting sometimes if you wake into the real world that pales in comparison to the beauty and wonders of the dream world.
This is just something you have to get over - you have to remember that at some point you are going to turn those ethereal moments of joy, or even sometimes inconceivable acts of brutality into writing gold - and get on with recording the dream.
In fact, the very act of recording it will ground the vivid dreamer allowing them to get on with their day without a kind of wistful malaise for that world so much more interesting, or that woman who entranced them, or those majestic mountain peaks that glittered with turquoise snow in an alien world in a far distant galaxy 😂
Believe me, I've had periods where the vividness and beauty of my early morning vivid dreams left unrecorded have haunted me periodically throughout the day.
This may be one of a series I share, or I might record occasional dream diaries on hive, I am still undecided on this, and the wisdom of sharing what are sometimes disturbing and brutal dreamscapes. Perhaps instead I shall share a series of articles similar to this one outlining what I call my writer's toolkit, different techniques similar to the dream diary that allow you to tap - or in some cases reignite - your creativity.
In any case, I can always record my dreams in my personal dream diary word doc. I will share this one with you today - partly because it was a strange, poignant and beautiful wish fulfilment dream - as an example of how vivid and profound the messages of our dreams can be for the creative writer. I was originally going to put this on Twitter as a chain tweet, and then I suddenly thought, wait a minute... do you want to enrich the timeline and line the pockets of Elon Musk with your dreams. Fck that!
The Dream - The Love of Water, a Beautiful Blonde and the Silver Pyramids
N.B. point indentations indicate where a scene change takes place without any transition as happens in dreams.
Dream 1
I dreamt so much about water last night. In the first, and vaguer of the two, dreams I remember, I was learning how to make cakes in a professional kitchen with Gordon Ramsey "shit... absolute shit" he bellowed as cake after cake was thrown into the bin.
Then finally, a cake emerged from the oven so light and airy that we were both knocked into silence. It had those strange folds of air your find in sourdough bread in between layers of golden sponge that tasted like a mix of salted caramel and honeycomb. Gordon nodded his head and shook my hand then proceeded to slice various pieces of the giant flat cake into different-sized sections.Next, we were in an indoor water park in a large city that I didn't recognize. Outside the windows, I could see dreary commuters walking past staring in at us, suits all grey with the backdrop of traffic. All around me the screams and hoots of happy children could be heard as some of them plunged down the waterslide but most devoured large pieces of the cake I had made and Gordon Ramsey had crafted into a large child-sized castle that the kids could actually run in and out of as they pulled chunks of the wall away in glee stuffing their happy little faces.
Smiles are what I remember most vividly at this point. Smiling children, one child handing me a piece of my castle cake and exclaiming with a mischievous grin "eat some chef before the castle is all eaten away." As I stared around at this tableau of glee Gordon Ramsey stepped forward and spoke slowly in a low voice "you made all this happen." I then leaped onto the water slide, cake stuffed in my mouth, and sped down to land in the pool at the bottom. As soon as I submerged in the pool it felt like the water was hugging me like it was part of me like it was calling me home.
Dream 2
I'm fishing off the coast of the Mediterranean sea, waist-deep in the shallow bay a grinning fisherman speaks to me in Spanish (I understand and speak only a little Spanish) "a new blood moon my friend, the fish all come to the surface." We circled a shoal with a constricting net, pulling it ever tighter into a ball until hundreds of small silverfish shimmered in the sun. Their wet bodies as slick as seaweed slapped against my arms and the smell of salt in the air warmed my heart, the soft lap of the warm tide seemed to send a spark through my body that lifted me for a moment to hover above the scene of cheering fishermen in azure waters.
Suddenly I'm in a car with a beautiful woman who bared a remarkable resemblance to Drew Barrymore in the film '50first Dates', a film I really didn't enjoy by the way 😆But she has this curly wild blonde hair blowing in the wind as we speed along an empty highway with the top down in our convertible car. The highway has large holes and areas with cracks that I have to swerve to avoid. It looks like a war has recently passed the area, evidenced also by the buildings climbing the hill to our left which bare the scorch marks of shelling. My unfeasibly beautiful, young partner leans into my neck and nuzzles me, whispering in my ear "they have a quaint little place by the first of the three pyramids."
Three silver pyramids shimmer in the distance, mimicking the flash of my share of the dancing fish that lay in a bucket of seawater in the back of the car. The air stirs a warm shiver through the length of my body "it's going to be alright, we're nearly there" she whispers.
We discover the strangest house built at the base of one of the pyramids. It looks almost like something from Hobbiton, or one of those old-world houses you see in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The front of the building is a kind of triangular shape, built of wooden frames of some almost orange wood with more normal brown wood planks inter-crossing them to make up the main wall, built directly onto the side of the pyramid which flashes silver fire intermittently as clouds pass.
"Hey, you made it." A woman shouts up at us from a waterfall running down the side of the pyramid next to the house. The waterfall is comprised of a film of water so thin that we only now register it at all. At the base is a small pool, where a man and a woman are staring up at us smiling. I recognize them somehow, yet I've never met them in my life. I distinctly remember a feeling of deep sadness at this point within the dream, like they were relatives long dead but young and in the prime of their life.
"Bring the catch down and I'll cook it up" the man calls to me as I notice I'm carrying the bucket of fish, and I decent a graven path through sheer rock to the mouth of the pool, my Drew Barrymore-esque girlfriend skipping ahead of me and diving into the pool to swim to her friend who stands under the thin film of water against the side of the pyramid. They embrace like friends long parted; they seem to shine in that silver light with a glowing deep blue aura. The man embraces me, again I have that feeling that we're friends long parted, and gives me a quizzical look "you've been on a long journey, rest with the women while I cook these fish." He smiles, takes the bucket, and walks through a small door below the house that I can see perched above.
The two women beckon to me and I join them in an embrace under that thin film of water. This wasn't 'one of those dreams.' It didn't feel particularly sexual at this point, beyond the obvious fact that I was sandwiched between two beautiful women. I stood between them and the water flowed over me, first, it seemed to cover my chest then slowly the rest of my body until I even noticed a thin film of translucent water flowing over my open eyes.
The whole world exploded at that point into a riotous flux of colors, shining from points of confluence. Dark purple blotches thrummed like a heartbeat from the signs of war, but the sky shone bluer than even the blue I've witnessed scuba diving when looking up through tropical waters at the sky from depth. The sea was an ever-changing pattern of turquoise interspersed with flashes of dark umber, bone whites, loamy browns, and argent flashes to rival those of the pyramids. In a kind of laughing cadence, my two beautiful companions echoed each other as if speaking as one "he finally sees truly." I kiss and embrace my girlfriend and warmth spreads through me like fire.Suddenly, we are all sitting in the pool at the base of the pyramid. I barely register the others. All I can concentrate on is the massive pile of different-sized silverfish steaming on a plate in front of me. I pick them apart, pulling spines successfully from some and eagerly devouring the boneless meat while failing to dissect others as well and having to work around the bones. This lasted for a long time... and I slowly woke in my bed with a strong desire to both go swimming and eat preferably fish.
Analysing Dreams - How to Use it as a Creative Tool
Thanks for persevering through that delve into my somewhat disturbed psyche. Believe it or not, both of these dreams could be considered mild in the subject matter although the second was vividly spiritual in its themes, and left me a little shaken upon waking until I reached my computer and recorded it in my dream journal doc. At times when I've written a lot of horror fiction, I wouldn't inflict my subconscious nightly wanderings on other people unless it be in a piece of horror fiction. Lol, there is a reason why people choose to buy horror novels; it isn't to everyone's taste.
But in analysing these dreams there are some clear messages my subconscious is throwing in my face. In the first dream, my lack of positive male role models growing up, and obvious tendencies toward trying to live up to the standards of moronic male figures in my life at times (FFS I'm not a chef and Gordon Ramsey is a tit, despite his successes he basically built a persona on shouting and swearing at people). My choice not to have children, and the joy that you do miss out on when living through your children (I have been a stepdad for a while so I understand this to an extent). My love of a really good cake?
In the second dream, most notably my dream points me to my affinity with the sea, and for anyone who has read my scuba scribe blogs, the deep and spiritual connection I have with entering that underwater world. My subconscious also seems to want to somewhat cruelly torture me with the fact I've been single for some time, and there are elements of worry around global conflicts that plague humankind at this time.
But these obvious themes and messages are not what I'm seeking as a creative writer. The gems - the parts that will inspire sections of fiction, or descriptive passages - tend to emerge much later, days or weeks after the dream has been recorded. What strikes me most about these dreams, and most importantly the second one is the indefinable and surreal moments. They will bring me both the inspiration and catharsis I spoke about in the first paragraphs of this post.
The sections that most interest me upon first consideration, and I know will reveal more understanding and inspiration in regards to fiction writing are:
I'm fishing off the coast of the Mediterranean sea, waist-deep in the shallow bay a grinning fisherman speaks to me in Spanish (I understand and speak only a little Spanish) "a new blood moon my friend, the fish all come to the surface." We circled a shoal with a constricting net, pulling it ever tighter into a ball until hundreds of small silverfish shimmered in the sun. Their wet bodies as slick as seaweed slapped against my arms and the smell of salt in the air warmed my heart.
A man and a woman are staring up at us smiling. I recognize them somehow, yet I've never met them in my life. I distinctly remember a feeling of deep sadness at this point within the dream, like they were relatives long dead but young and in the prime of their life.
I barely register the others. All I can concentrate on is the massive pile of different-sized silverfish steaming on a plate in front of me. I pick them apart, pulling spines successfully from some and eagerly devouring the boneless meat while failing to dissect others as well and having to work around the bones. This lasted for a long time...
It is often the most surreal, seemingly insignificant things that yield the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and it often takes a while for that golden light of inspiration to shine out.
My advice - based on how it has worked for me in over 15 years keeping a dream diary - is to read through your dream diary sparingly. It is ok to skim it now and then, but going there with a purpose like you are going to extract the marrow of creativity from the bones of your dreams hasn't yielded results for me.
Occasionally, when skimming something might jump out at you and pull you in, and this is fine, this is your conscious and subconscious making that magical connection. But more often, what will happen is after a time, something either mental or physical in your life will make you remember a passage or part of a dream, or you may even have part of a dream reoccur in another dream. This is the call to action!
This is the time when that dream you innocuously wrote down - perhaps frustrated that you were spending an hour a day recording your dreams for no seeming reason - will bind with something real either in your life, or in the life of a character you're already working on or writing about, and this is when the magic of the dream diary comes into its own.
Thanks for reading ☘️
All image sources in this post are CC license sourced from pixabay and linked to credit beneath the picture.
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