What Dreams are Made Of

Okay, I started this draft thinking maybe I'd just share a story that came from one of my dreams (and I don't mean some soft like gently-inspired my line of thinking kind of coming from my dreams).

But I thought maybe I should explain that a little before I just let them escape out into the world, because I know exactly how odd my dreams are. I dream them and I still don't know where they come from. I'm inclined to believe we're all a little like this - odd dreams we aren't sure on the origin of - but my world-view may be biased. I've heard some of my little sister's dreams retold the next morning and they are bonkers - something something Sedgely town centre was a train station. And my mother semi-regularly dreams she's being chased by zombies, which I would definitely consider a nightmare more than a dream, but who am I to judge?

Now, I've completed a whole degree in Psychology, which is the study of the mind and it's intricacies (humble brag, I know), so I know that the professional understanding of dreams is that they are our brains' way of interpreting the events of the day and a side-effect of events being processed into long-term memories. But still, why do they get so weird? I don't know about anyone else, but my days don't typically pass with my fighting fantastical monsters or running from zombies.

Okay, maybe the real processing happens more subtly and subconsciously than I typically give my brain credit for, as I do spend a lot of my time coming up with fantastical worlds and the creatures that would live there - I'm a fantasy writer in my free time. But still, I'm not sure where the inspiration came from for my two most memorable weird dreams. Yes, I wrote as much as I could remember of them down when I woke up (and one of these dreams was last night, hence my writing this today). Actually, a part of my dream last night actually inspired me to start learning the melody of a song on the keyboard... because a dude in my dream was playing it on the keyboard. Talk about meta-dreaming!

I wrote up the dream as quick as I could in one of my notebooks this morning, and I've written it up onto my laptop during this afternoon - and this is where it inspired my writing, because I started to continue where the dream left off, with what I might've expected to happen next. What's funny is that this is the second time that I've not only wanted to make note of an intriguing dream when I wake up, but also been actually able to recall it well enough to write it up. And both dreams came in the past 12 months. I have had a previous experience, years ago, where I wanted to write up a dream, but when I first woke up I couldn't get past the blocker of actually putting words on the page, and eventually that dream faded. I'm not concerned, as it was an expansion of a dream I'd had when I was a child that I'd wanted to write down, so I expect that some day it will happen again and writing these dreams now will help me to be prepared for that inevitable day, even if it doesn't happen til I'm 50.

Let me know in the comments if you've ever had an experience where you had a dream so bonkers that you just had to write it down, even if it didn't then inspire your writing in some way. I'm going to head off now, to work out where my dreams will take me next!