Do Your Dreams Tell Your Stories

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Joan Didion

How many times have you awoken from a dream so vivid it felt like you could reach out and touch the character?

Did that same dream wake you up scrambling for a pen and paper or your favorite note app on your phone?

Did you write a novel, a short story, or a nonfiction piece based on that vivid, technicolor dream?

On a spring morning in 1974, William Styron awoke to the lingering image of a woman he had known in his early twenties. He saw her standing in the hallway with her arms full of books, the blue numbers of a tattoo visible beneath her sleeve. At that moment, he realized he needed to abandon the book he had been working on in order to tell this woman’s story. As soon as he returned to his studio, he began writing Sophie’s choice’s opening.

Many of my characters and plotlines have come to me in dreams; some have come almost fully formed, like William Stryon’s Sophie, but most are shadows and need fleshing out.

In Like Letters Written in the Sand, one of my more recent stories, I knew some things about Anna-leis but others would come to me as I wrote.

Although I knew Like Letters Written in the Sand was a love story, I didn’t realize how powerful this particular love story was, a love story that would defy all odds and work when everything was pointing against it.

It had been six weeks since her world had been turned upside down. A month had passed since he’d declared his love for her. However, the memories of being trapped in that car, for what seemed like an eternity, she’d have flashbacks of the truck coming at her. Out of control, the impact crushed her car like an accordion, crushing her legs.

Later Anna-leis would learn that the driver of the truck had an alcohol level over three times the legal limit, a fact that left Anna-leis seething with anger, and left Clarence wanting to do something to protect Anna-leis, but he couldn’t protect her from an idiot getting behind the wheel so wasted, he couldn’t protect her, not the way he wanted to, and at the time he had nearly lost her, he hadn’t found the courage to tell her how much he loved her, that happened when he was sitting next to her hospital bed two weeks after he had gotten the call she’d been flown to New Hope Hospital, the hospital most equipped to deal with her severe injuries.

He’d kept vigil by her bedside for two weeks, praying he wouldn’t lose her. No one had ever made him feel the way she did. He would risk his life for her.

Writing is a dreaming process, we dream while sleeping and we dream when we are writing during the day. Our characters become as real as those sitting beside us, if not more so.

Years ago, I shared a story with my best friend, concerned about what she would think. A few years prior to that Georgia trip, I had written a story about an amputee. My best friend, who is also an amputee, gave me her insight into what I had written.

What did you do to make the character seem so real?” My friend asked. “How are you able to understand her feelings?” I couldn’t tell. Like always, I envisioned what it would be like to be in the character’s shoes. Even though the story is lost to time, my friend’s reaction to it would remind me of the importance of putting others in my character’s shoes.

Anna-leis felt Clarence squeeze her hands slightly tighter as the doctors explained the severity of the damage to her legs, and how they had to amputate. Nearly every bone in her legs had been crushed, the damage so severe that they had no choice but to amputate both legs above the knee.

Tears were forming in her eyes, tears she was trying hard to blink back, but the reality of the situation, the man holding her hand, broke the dam loose.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Anna-leis asked, looking at Clarence with pleading eyes.

He squeezed her hand a bit tighter. “I don’t know Anna-leis, but we will figure it out together.”

“Clarence, I don’t want your pity.”

“Can’t you see by now, I love you?” He said, grabbing her hands.

“I’m broken.” Anna-leis said, the tears, falling on to her pillow.

“No, you’re beautiful, that hasn’t changed, it never will.”

Frankenstein was inspired by a dream Mary Shelley had. In the summer of 1816, Mary Godwin (who had not yet married Percy Bysshe Shelley) entered a highbrow writing contest. Byron, the party’s host, announced, “We’ll each write a ghost story.”. They didn’t come up with much, but John Polodori’s Vampyre and Frankenstein, a modern Prometheus, gives us two truly immortal monsters. Ahead of an evening of reanimation and galvanization, Mary Godwin was unable to sleep well: “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, giving the successive images that arose in my mind a vividness well beyond the usual bounds of reverie…”I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had made. The hideous phantasm of a man stretched out before me…”

Jane Eyre came to Charlotte Bronte in a dream.

In a dream, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight came to her, showing a young couple discussing why love couldn’t work between a human and a vampire.

Stephen Kings’ books, Misery and Dreamcatcher, were inspired by dreams.

What impact have your dreams had on your writing? Did they give you characters that you turned into stories that influenced your writing? Have your dreams inspired characters that have endured long after you typed “The End”?

© Michelle R Kidwell

September.06.2022

Revised May.15.2024