In Dreams

                I’ve been steadily filling up my Writing Practice notebook with rubbish of all sorts. I’ve been trying to keep a dream journal, as suggested by JennyAlexander in Writing In The House Of Dreams, and an earlier book which Jenny Alexander suggested, PatriciaGarfield’s Creative Dreaming. You’re supposed to be able to get insights about your life from your dreams, and you’re also meant to be able to ‘induce dreams’- that is, decide what you want to dream about, in order to get your unconscious mind to solve problems for you and give you ideas.

                I keep a pocket notebook and pen in my jacket in the hallway. When I wake up, I scribble down whatever it is I can remember of the dream I’ve just had. If I can get even a few details down, I find I can remember more when I come to write about the dream for writing practice. I usually wake up once in the night, to go to the toilet, so even my bladder is helping my creativity. If I don’t write down anything, though, I find that I forget everything, even dreams which I’m certain sure I’ll remember. An odd side effect is that I’m beginning to remember dreams which I had one or two years ago, before I even decided to keep a dream journal.

                Eventually, you have to work out what all these dream symbols mean to you (that is, to you personally, not what Freud, Jung, etc; tell you they’re supposed to mean). I haven’t done that yet. I’ve been James Bond in a few of my dreams, and I wonder if there’s anything in that other than the obvious.

                This week, I induced (I think) my first dream. In said to myself, as I shut my eyes, that I would dream up a romcom, and that night I had a dream in which MartinFreeman (playing his Tim character from TheOffice) was looking after the flat of the girl he was is in love with. There was weird stuff in it, such as a rain of fish, and the girl turned him down three times, but it kind of fulfilled my requirements. The next night, though, when I asked for a romcom with a happy ending, I couldn’t repeat the feat.