Dreams Can Inspire Your Next Work of Fiction

I'm thinking about dreams this morning because last night I had a very strange dream. Often I may have a nightmare about being lost, or someone with a weapon is after me, or being funny enough to do stand up comedy. I once dreamed of hosting Saturday Night Live. I've also dreamed about writing a hit song (that was lost after awakening), walking on the Moon in which I remember being in a domed city, how the artificial atomosphere felt to breathe, and the crunch of the surface under my feet. That very dream was turned into a short story to be released July 15, 2020, by DLG Publishing as a short story titled "Olympus."

I've met Cleopatra in dreams, as well as sailed on a 19th-century ship across the Atlantic. Six months before the Three Mile Island accident, I had a dream that mirrored the actual accident. In waking life, I was in the same exact place and time in Middletown as events unfolded as I had in the dream. In 1971, I had the most emotional dream of my life. After a former fiance died, I was grieving to the point of reckless abandon. I had taken ownership of her sports car and nearly wiped out while driving. The thought of taking someone else with me scared me into being more careful, but I was still a mess. The dream was as real as they get.

The woman I almost married came to me in the dream dressed in white, and said in a firm tone just sort of scolding, "Your grief is well taken, but your place is among the living."

Dreams have found their way into my writing and a new twist on time travel is planned for a future novel--all because of a dream. Dreams can be wondrous, frightening, or so beautiful that you hate waking up. As a teenager, I chronically dreamed of being romantically involved with a movie star upon whom I had a hopeless crush. It was very innocent, but overwhelmingly captivating. In those dreams, when I realized I was awakening, I was greatly disappointed and struggled to go back to sleep, determined to resume that dream world. I succeeded only once--the rest were over faster than a Hollywood marriage and I had to face my day in reality. Still, dreams have offered me a rich source of material to where I can go back and live in them through written words.

Often, dreams symbolize our worst fears and others are just plain stupid. We find ourselves in the middle of a plot or story for which we have no clue how we got there or how we became involved with strangers in their drama. There are those who believe we are interacting with the Astral Plane while sleeping, but I cannot say I am aware of any such ability--with the exception, possibly, my late fiance coming to me. I have not yet hosted Saturday Night Live or felt the lunar regolith beneath my feet.

As for the dream last night, in case you are still interested in this tome (by Facebook and Twitter standards), I dreamed I could levitate off the ground and float along in any direction quite easily--as I decided to do so for no other reason than to show off to a group of people seated at a picnic table just before I entered a public restroom. When I came out of the men's room, I realized I had encroached upon enemy territory and a huge warrior about a foot and a half taller than me grabbed me by the shirt collar and raised a sword big enough to cut off the head of a dragon above my head ready to strike me. In the dream, I was more powerful. I easily overtook the man, broke free of his grip, blocked his sword and disarmed him, and picked him up off the ground by the neck and tossed him to the ground. I didn't harm him, but he was completely disoriented. I just walked away. No one said that dreams have literary merit, but who knows what could end up in a story after plugging holes in the logic. The rest of the dream morphed into a bloody battle of ninja like soldiers armed with automatic weapons, but I'll save the rest of the story--not for the couch of a psychiatrist, but for some work of fiction.

What crazy dreams have you had?