What Influence do Dreams have on my Writing?

What influence do dreams have on my writing?  I would say quite a lot.  I built an entire trilogy around the dreams, nightmares, and visions of one of my characters.  Since the Moon was in Pisces at the moment of my birth, dreams and visions play a major part in my writing.  Even the fact that I write fantasy has to do with the Moon, a luminary of mystery, being in dreamy Pisces.  Whenever I’m at a loss for what to do with or to my main character, I have her (my Main Characters are usually female) I have her have a dream, and then I know how at least the next several pages will go.  

If you haven’t gathered this yet on your own, let me inform you that I am a discovery novelist.  I’ve tried to outline, really I have, but that just makes me want to dive into telling the story even more.  I’ll go into this further next week, when I discuss the structure of my writing.  Very often a dream I had the night before supplies the theme for today’s chapter.  I have a dream journal, which I keep sporadically.  I think every writer should have one.  Record the dream,then discuss what various symbols mean to you.  Dream interpretation is a very subjective field.  It isn’t like it is in the Bible, where one person tells the other what his dream means.  Some symbols are indeed universal, but the rest are best left up to the individual to interpret for hirself.  One example I got from Facebook early today was one young lady wrote about babies.  It could mean you’re going to bear a child, but it’s more likely that this child is going to be a child generated by the mind, in other words, a creative project of some sort.   This was emphatically so in the case of the young lady, who was definitely not in a position to get pregnant.  She’s single, not even in a relationship; there is no beau or suitor on the horizon.  In this case, the interpretation is definitely a creative project of some sort.  

I had one of these baby dreams about 20 years ago.  I found this baby in a car,  and nobody came forward to claim hir.  So, what did the baby represent? A creative project nobody wanted to claim?  It turned out to be my vampire novel.  I made it my own after all.  And in this book I had three main POV characters, as the story was told from three different points of view.  Or maybe it was my story about the Hopi guardian of the underground waters.  The nobody claiming the child could be that from 2009 until 2015 I had no publisher for my work, until Patricia Bates came along.  That’s the reason I’ve been so driven to write, and in this time of Quarantine and Covid-19, my dreams have been unusually vivid and memorable.  I suppose you know that the dreams that are the most vivid and memorable to us are those sessions of REM sleep closes to the time when we wake up for the day.  

Stay tuned next week when I discuss the structure of my writing.  Stay healthy and stay safe.