Sometimes my dreams frighten me. Sometimes they crack me up. Literally. The whole scene from the movie The Waterboy--in which a college professor asks the class why alligators are aggressive and in which Adam Sandler stand ups and scientifically explains “Because alligators got all them teeth and no toothbrush”—replayed in a dream and apparently made me laugh out loud in my sleep. Sometimes my dreams are simply telling me I need a major vacation from reality, like when I dream I’m proofreading the always-riveting prescribing information for a drug product, that insert with the really tiny type that contains all the potential side effects and warnings for the drug, which, if you actually read it, can make you completely mental.
My mother, my aunt, and I always have really weird dreams when there’s a full moon. What’s the scientific explanation for this? I’m sure I don’t know. Once my mom dreamt she was covered in baked potatoes. She also dreamt she was a basketball star and kept running down the court and dunking the ball (she’s five-foot-three, by the way, and she woke up sweating). Most of my weirdest dreams involve food. Once I was floating in a life-size ice cream sundae with peanut butter sauce. Another time I was roller skating inside a huge pinball machine and there were snack bars in the bumpers. I’m pretty sure I was dieting when I had those dreams. Why can’t I dream normal dreams about Pierce Brosnan or…wait, I DID dream about Pierce Brosnan once and I can’t go into the sordid details here.
Sometimes it helps to take a dream apart and interpret it. Sometimes, frankly, interpretation is crap; a dream is just a dream. But let’s try it with one of mine. The giant sundae. Dreaming of ice cream evidently denotes pleasure and satisfaction with your life, good luck and success in love. I have yet to come across a dream book that actually has entries for peanut butter sauce. I dreamt there were tornadoes swirling all about me the other night—this supposedly suggests I am experiencing extreme emotional outbursts and temper tantrums (wait, that’s just my daily work day!). I also dreamt I got kicked off American Idol (I was in the final round at least), and again, I laughed in my sleep. On a more serious note, several days before 911, my mom and both had strange dreams; I dreamt I was among many people running to get out of a very tall building in New York City and she dreamt a submarine hit the ocean floor so hard a building collapsed. That was, frankly, freaky.
My point, and I do have one, is that dreams can be really good fodder for a writer. I read somewhere that we all daydream an average of 70 to 120 minutes a day. Obviously, there are some who take time-wasting to a whole other level, daydreaming 18 hours a day. That’s a lot of wasted time unless you put it to good use, say, like in your novel. I highly recommend activity like sleeping and daydreaming that lets your mind wander and decreases your level of awareness to the point that you lose yourself in your imagined story (not, of course, when you’re operating heavy machinery or driving on a multi-lane highway or performing brain surgery). For my first fiction suspense novel, Dead On, I was thinking about my characters so much that I actually began dreaming about them. Chapter 21 of Dead On is actually the result of a dream I had, which I believe in part may be either inherited memory or a traumatic past life I lived before the recorded and often skewed history in textbooks. I used most of the dream in the book and added a little bit to it, because of course, Dead On is fiction.
Dreams can heal, entertain, inform and stimulate. Some dreams are fairly common—like being caught naked in a public place or being back in high school where you can’t remember your friggin’ locker combination. In the case of the writer, dreams can help you plot and explore while your cranky, nit-picking, self-debasing critic is down and out. Dreaming can help you be the writer you always imagined yourself to be, can connect us to the human race and our art. The benefit of covering yourself with baked potatoes, however, is still being studied.
www.DeadOnNovel.comMy first fiction suspense novel, Dead On, is currently being optioned by Gold Circle Films, best known for the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I'm currently at work on a sequel to Dead On and another fiction suspense novel set in Ocean City, NJ. Dead On was published to rave reviews by iUniverse in 2004 and awarded Editor's Choice and Reader's Choice. After a strategic local marketing campaign, Dead On quickly climbed to #1 and #2, respectively, on the unique top-sellers lists in Warrington and Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on amazon.com teamed with Borders in December 2005. Kat Martin, New York Times best-selling author with over 11 million books in print, called Dead On "Brilliant. A chilling erotic suspense that will send shivers down your spine. A sensuous, gripping tale of murder through the ages."
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