I dreamed last night…Can’t tell you how many times my husband’s found me trying to wake up over my first can of Diet Coke in the morning, realized I’m more tired than normal, even though chronic insomnia isn’t anything new for me, and heard me say, “I dreamed last night…”
Yeah, now that you ask, my fascination with the dream theory and the metaphysical, parapsychological mysteries I weave my fantasy stories around often find their genesis in early morning, shadowy moments. The mind is an amazing, complicated pain in the ass sometimes, and I can’t help but want to know more. Even when I’m finding it hard to pry my eyelids open on heavy mornings. It’s almost like being hung over, except there was no alcohol involved in this cycle. This circuit, if you will. A dream circuit that replays itself regularly through my valuable sleep patterns, when I actually do find myself sleeping. Damn it ;o)
It’s almost like the dreams have a mind of their own. Almost like they’re in control of the shadows of my sleep, working through the things I need to work out while I’m waking, but I’m not paying close enough attention then because I can distract myself with whatever “physical” things I need to to keep the metaphysical at bay.The dreams that exhaust me (and you, I suspect) at times are processing the emotions and fears and questions and doubts and excitement that won’t resolve itself, they’ll just keep rolling around our minds, until the circuit closes completely and our subconscious can rest.
In Secret Legacy even more than Dark Legacy, I’m playing with the same phenomenon. It’s a dream theory truth that or sleeping minds are emotional centers, and that they work on and rework on and rework on crucial themes from our waking lives until we’re ready to handle whatever we’re avoiding feeling when we’re not sleeping. Did you see the movie Inception? The “lucid dreaming” basis for it shows us the same theory, turned on its ear in a different way than I play with things in my fantasies. Our sleeping minds are powerful things, and they’re predisposed to work on what we need to work on most. So, if we can figure out what those “must resolve” things are and focus our emotions and conscious awareness on them hard enough, can we predict, manipulate, and control our dreaming awareness enough to produce the results we want in our waking lives?
Yes, the creators of Inception said. Yes, I agreed in SL and DL. Please, Dog, tell me it’s true, I’m begging on mornings like this, when the emotions and energy of an exciting, busy, often challenging few weeks are still racing through my brain when I collapse in bed at night, running free together and spinning realities out of bits and pieces of my subconscious all night long, working through things that are close to but not the same as my waking “to do” lists, until I wake up with a headache and a sense that I haven’t slept at all.
And the kicker is that I, like the psychic twins in my first two Legacy novels, know that this process has to happen.There’s a phenomenon I’m playing with in the third novel in the series that I’m just starting to draft, called clairsentience–the ability to receive and feel and work with the energy of the world and the people around you. My psychic twins do this, channel this, through their dreams. Their dream curcuits are how they’ll solve the mystery threatening their lives (and in Secret Legacy, the life of an innocent child). But they resist, because the power of dreams terrifies them. Because what is says about our subconscious minds is a powerful, disturbing thing. Oh, and their dreams and psychic talents give them the ability to touch, manipulate, and even destroy other realities. That can be pretty scary, you know?
I resist much of the dream work I have to do at first, because I’d like to sleep peacefully for a few nights. So, no, I’M not channeling my characters (in case you were worried ;o) or thinking there’s something mystical going on in my shadowy mind. Except that it is the emotions and challenges of the day, working their way into my dreams. Dreaming is a process of something we don’t “see” affecting things we do. It is a way for people and places and realities that aren’t quite real anymore coming to life in our minds alone, so we can “get” the things we let go of too early when we were awake. In our dreams, we’ll keep coming back to these unspoken things, whether we want to or not, until they get the attention they’re due. And that can be pretty scary, you know?
I’ll get to the bottom of this dream circuit. I always do. My twins, bless their hearts, have a much tougher time of it than I will. Because SOMEONE needs to pay for long, endless nights like last night ;o)
As for you, my Psychic Realm friends, how long will you fight the power of your mind’s amazing, spooky dream work?
Bwahahahahaha…
Have a great weekend!
Tags: Anna DeStefano, clairsentience, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, parapsychology, precognition, psychic, psychic children, psychokinesis, Secert Legacy
This is so interesting! The timing is perfect. I have been documenting my dreams since I was a teenager. Recently, through my dreams, I was able to change my WIP to incorporate dreams.
I love your blogs!
Hey, Tammy! It’s so great to hear from you, and to hear you’re liking the meandering of my blog mind. The dream/psychic realm posts are my favorite, too. Though there’s so much else going on right now, I only get to writing about them once or twice a week.
How exciting that you’re playing with dreams in your WIPs, too!
Howa re things in your “neck of the woods?”
Anna, great blog! I used to keep a dream journal as a believer in Dreamtime power. Home renovations derailed my journaling but lately, upon waking I recall dreams and say, ‘hey, that’d make a good story.’ Although I have yet to scribble the notes, I figure the ideas are in there, somewhere, like parsley in canned tomato sauce.
Dream journals are great things, especially if you can keep your notepad right by the bed with a pen to jot things down before the images and spirals of emotion and memory fade. That can happen so fast after we wake, and sometimes, as you say, some of our greatest inspiration lingers in that in-between place.
I dream a lot and they are very vivid. I had a dream that my daughter- in- law’s sister was getting married. I saw the wedding and reception and even remembered the food they were serving. About a week later I mentioned the dream to my daughter-in-law and she gave me a strange look and said her sister had just got engaged.
This has happened to me many times, having a dream about things before they happen. My mom also had these kind of dreams.
I’ve been one of “those” dreamers all my life, Rita. There are lots of metaphysical explainations for these “spookier” types of dreaming. I’ll talk more about them as Secret Legacy’s release draws closer, and as I plot out the next three books in the series.
Things I’ve already touched on: is there a sense of “time” in dreams, or are the past and present and future flowing together as the same energy (in our minds) when we sleep; are dreams connections to parallel dimensions and relationships happening around us that we simply can’t connect with while our minds are awake; are our minds, when we sleep, assessing information and energy from our day-to-day lives and formulating possible alternative futures that might or might not logically follow, so then when one of these possibilities does occur, those of us who remember dreams recall something similar and wonder, hmmmmm…
Or, like the Psychic Realm of my Legacy series and movies like Inception, are psychics really able to enter our subconscious through dreams and program/control future activity and reality by programming our minds while we sleep…
Bwahahahahaha!
I wonder Anna, if you saw a difference in your dreaming while your health was so bad.
Acutally, until they got my thyroid regulated better and some of the stress settled down, there were large parts of last year where I didn’t sleep, let alone dream. I’m a firm believer in the idea that lack of both is detrimental to your emotional and physical health.
Once I was able to relax better into more sustained REM patterns, the dreams were more vivid than they’ve been in a long time. They told more complete stories and repeated with more frequency. I was able to slip back into old dreams and carry them forward. The reason, a lot of things, I suspect.
I hadn’t been able to write for large parts of last year, and I think there was a lot of pent up creativity that needed an outlet. I also has a lot to puzzle through (child growing up, illness and recovery and fear of relapse, business concerns, general family stuff, etc). It was like a nexus of emotions building all year, and emotions rule our dreaming worlds.
And I was relaxing more as the year went on, because I’d had to let so much fall away while I focused on getting healthy again. Things weren’t so hectic, schedule-wise, so there was less running all over the place and more thinking and experiencing and staying with now. I think that can focus our dreams. I’ve always done a lot of yoga and pilates and mind-body-balance work, and that ramped up a great deal last year, too, to a level I’ve never sustained before. I’m committed to carrying that forward this year and the rest of the world begins to flow back in. I see a definite connection between that practice and dream quality and frequency.
Great question. Sounds like it needs a blog all it’s own. I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts!
I had a dream last night I was at a Garden Party with the Queen of England. I woke up with a bad back & a stomach ache.
I’ve always thought that we dream in parallel dimensions. It’s really the only thing that makes sense to me. Very rarely do I dream a dream that is straight-forward and crystal clear. Where I get the dream and it makes perfect sense. So I have to believe that most of the dreams I have are simultaneously, overlapping dreams, happening at once and if I could remember every detail I could splice together the correct sequences. I hope this makes sense.