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Do Your Dreams Tell Your Stories? (Revised)
The Impact of Dreams on Writing
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Joan Didion
When you woke up from a vivid dream, did the character seem so real you could touch him or her?
Was that same dream so vivid that it woke you up scrambling for a pen and paper or your phone’s note app to record it?
Was it possible for you to use that vivid, technicolor dream as the basis for a novel, a short story, or a piece of nonfiction?
In 1974, William Styron awoke to the lingering image of a woman he had known in his early twenties. Standing in the hallway, her arms filled with books, a tattoo visible under her sleeve, blue numbers appeared on her skin. That moment, he knew he had to abandon the book he had been working on, to tell this woman’s story. As soon as he returned to his studio, he wrote what would become Sophie’s choice.
Characters and plotlines have come to me in dreams; some were nearly fully formed, like William Stryon’s Sophie, but most were shadows, not yet fully formed, but ready to be fleshed out.
The idea for Anna-leis In Like Letters Written in the Sand, one of my most recent stories, came to me in a dream. While I knew some things about her, others…
