“Are you ever going to stop writing stories about dreams?” my agent asked when I sold my spooky thriller, Her Forgotten Betrayal to Entangled’s Dead Sexy books.
“Um… Not anytime soon,” was my honest response. I just can’t seem to stop buying research books and thinking of new ways to make the inner workings of our sleeping minds part of the stories and lives I create for my characters.
I’m ridiculously fascinated with dreams. They’ve been my constant companions since I was a child–long before I knew about lucid dreaming or parapsychology or dream interpretation. I’ve always remembered my dreams. More than a few times, my “night life” has given me premonitions of what would be coming in the day. And, yes, for those of you who’ve asked in comments or emails–I DO dream in color…
But what do spooky or even sweet dreams mean? I tend to put the characters in my books into dangerous situations, through some intense dreams or nightmares at them, and force them to connect more intentionally to their subconscious by paying attention to what their minds are telling them through their dreams. In Her Forgotten Betrayal, Shaw Cassidy’s stalker/killer/villain’s identity (along with everything else amnesia’s stolen from her) is right there in her dreams–if she’ll stop running from the truth and face her greatest fears… And her reward for all her hard dream work is the reclaiming the love of her life. Oh, and staying alive ;o)
But that’s fiction. What do dreams mean to you and me in our every day? I talk all the time in my Dream Theories series that dreams are almost never to be taken literally, and I try to back that up in all my novels by using symbol and theme to represent reality, and often by showing my characters being wrong over and over about what their dreams/nightmares mean–until they finally start looking closer and begin to connect the dots on a deeper level. (more…)
