Dream Meetings

"Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that -- as if Dinah hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream of course -- but then I was part of his dream too!"  Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

From time to time, I'm lucky enough to be visited in my dreams by characters I've created. Last night was one of those nights. A character from a recent book I finished took up a starring role in my dream. It wasn't the first time either this particular character has showed up and recently I've been playing around with this idea that dreams are like parallel worlds. What if, the characters are real somewhere else and I write about them because somehow our dreams get tangled together? 

This is a very Wonderlandish kind of idea. The above quote is one of my favorites, from the last paragraph of the second Alice book. This idea fascinates me: that what we think of as our dreams could really be us intruding on someone else's. There's a lot of this in The Looking Glass Wars as well, this sort of fragile dreamlike connection between worlds. It's always intrigued me.

The new novel I'm working on is partially about this concept. The character (a different one that the one that keeps me company as I sleep) has trouble distinguishing dreams from reality and it's as if the thin curtain between the two realms is tattered.

As for the other character, she's in a book you will all hopefully get to read sometime soon. But her persistence makes me suspect she isn't done with me telling her story. As I've always known, Freud would have a field day with me.