Dreaming in New Worlds

My dreams have always been affected by primarily two factors, my location and the phase of the moon. This week has tapped into both in a magical way. The full moon was last week, but its impact on my sleeping brain is far reaching. Combined with moving into our new home this past weekend, my dreams have taken an interesting and exciting turn. 

I frequently write about the Interzone setting of my dreams. It's usually a dream-warped version of some familiar location, or mashing of several locations filtered through the imagination. The dreams I've been having in the new house have taken me to places vastly unfamiliar. It feels like a long time since I've traveled into uncharted areas of the Interzone. Like unlocking new areas in a video game, I've been traveling to strange places laced with elaborate plots. If I loved the new house before we moved in, I'm really loving it now. I hope it continues to gift me with these stories.

Dream Theory

As the full moon approaches once again, my dreams have taken on a James Joyce Ulysses vibe, sending me on endless journeys through the Interzone version of Manhattan that I've inhabited for a large portion of my sleeping life. My most recent day spent there was an alternative universe version of Record Store Day and involved a trek up the Hudson River side of the island, reminiscent of my walk during the great blackout of 2002. Along the way, I stopped off to browse through crates of imaginary records and shelves of odd nic nacks. I also came across an amazing piece of secluded real estate along the river whose land resembles the above picture. I also managed to dine on a lobster dinner and visit with old friends. But like Stephen Dedalus, my mission always remained unclear.

Returning to Places You've Never Been

I woke from a dream last night and in my half-sleep, recalled a different dream, one that I had years ago. The odd thing about it was that it took me a while to recall it was a dream and not a real memory. It started with this deli that was sparsely stocked where I remember frequently going to get a sandwich. Then I recalled the streets surrounding it. I knew the record stores on the one street was where I went to get imports. Another street was where I went for new releases. Then I recalled the streets expanding out from this Interzone version of the East Village. I kept trying to remember when I had been there and where exactly these places were, when it dawned on me that I had been there in a dream dreamt years ago.

Dream Pillow

Last week was one of those weeks that just sort of got away from me. It was also the week that I purchased a new pillow for the first time in years. I was a little nervous about it. I often like to stick with a pillow for years on end, but was feeling impulsive. On its first night in use, my new pillow released an epic zombie apocalypse dream that more involved, longer, and more intense than any I've had in long time. It was one of those dreams that I woke up thinking about, and the act of thinking about it caused me to remember other epic dreams that I hadn't recalled before, some dating back years. 

Now a few nights in, I'm happy to say that it has given another very detailed and complicated nightmare. I say happy because I'm of the strange breed who enjoys nightmares. Nightmares are often the most vivid dreams we have and therefore are hard to forget. They don't frighten me, not after I wake anyway. So I'm never left with fear, only awe with how the mind weaves together dream logic into something so real and so surreal at the same time. 

Travels in Interzone

My dreams of late have been highly evolved, often having me traverse large regions of the Interzone. I've come across sections both familiar and previously unexplored. During my waking hours, when thinking about these recent travels, I've found myself recalling various dream locations, some of which are from dreams I had years and years ago. 

Given the nature of dream logic, it's never really easy to describe the plot in a coherent way. Many times the plot unravels before your very eyes while the dream is in production. The threads lead in different directions, pulling you along for the ride. While plot is usually fleeting, one thing that I find to be very vivid is location. Sometimes I can't remember what I was doing, but I can remember the house I was in, or the strange area of a city that never really existed but is rather a patchwork real and imagined places. 

The other day it struck me that some of these imagined elements most likely come from reading and the visual images conjured up from stories. It would explain the familiarity of the seemingly foreign. Not to mention the fact that I've encountered more unique places through reading, and the thousands of settings that I've written into existence, than I've been to in real life. I don't know why this never occurred to me before. It seems so obvious. Anyway, I've been enjoying thinking about it the past few days as I try to get a better understanding of the geography of Interzone.

In a Dream Far, Far Away...

While I have not yet seen The Force Awakens, I've recently spent some time in a galaxy far away. On the night the new film opened, I dreamt that I was in Star Wars: A New Hope. I was Luke, which is unusual seeing as how Luke was never my favorite character, it was always Han...but if I'm being honest, I've always been more Luke than Han. 

In the dream, I was with Obi Wan on the Death Star. We were face to face with Darth Vader and Obi Wan was attempting to bring Anakin back from the dark side. He was telling Darth how he'd accomplished everything he set out to do, and asked if things were really any better. Eventually he convinced Darth that his path on the dark side was finished, and the two of them went off to deal with the Emperor. Meanwhile, I was to wait in disguise as a maintenance man on the Death Star, accompanied with droids. The whole time, I was kept thinking to myself, this isn't how it happened before, and the idea of seeing how an alternative Star Wars would play out was the most exciting thing. 

Unfortunately I woke up before the saga ended. But it certainly awakened the excitement for the new film, which had already been in full bloom. It just goes to prove what I've always said, that the stories that are inside of us are more interesting that the stories of our lives most times. Long live fiction.

Communication Breakdown

(Artwork entitled Friendship by 4yo)

This past week I've been thinking quite a bit about life in the '90s. This wasn't spurred by any form of poetic waxing on times gone by, but rather a particular case of dream induced nostalgia. I had a string of dreams the other night populated with people I went to High School with, not even close friends, just classmates. Some of these people I hadn't thought about in years. Upon waking, through a chain of various related thoughts, my mind shifted to my apartment on St. Mark's Place in the mid-to-late 90's and the form of perpetual self-medicated, semi-isolation in which I existed. 

I remembered fondly how I used to fill the greeting tape of my answering machine with an entire song. This is a habit that dated back to High School and continued through college. That way, if anyone called, before they could leave message, they had to first listen to a song of my choosing, representing my current state of mind. I was trying to remember what songs I had used. I could only remember that once, for quite a long stretch of perhaps two months, my greeting was The Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down" from the rooftop concert in its entirety. For whatever reason, it seemed to sum up how I was feeling in those bleak grey winter days. 

The interesting thing about all of this is not the fact that I lived in a time when answering machines used full size cassette tapes, or that I still consider "Don't Let Me Down" to be the Fab Four's finest song, but rather the changing nature of communication. Back then if someone wished to get in contact with you, they were subjected to your whims. Whether it was an answering machine song, or an unanswered page, the parameters of the conversation were in your hands. In a sense it still is. You can choose not to answer the phone, or leave an email unread, but more and more the receiver is subjected to the whims of the sender. Be it on social media, or text messages, the sender "posts" something to you, forcing you to engage in whatever train of thought is steering them at the time. 

The circumstances of communication have changed dramatically in the past two decades and while there is a convenience and ease to it, I'm not sure I'm totally on board. In fact, I know that I'm not totally on board because I NEVER text. I have a cell phone that I only turn on when I need to make a call. Sometimes I'm amazed when I see elderly people who still correspond by snail mail, and it dawned on me that if I'm still around in 40 years, the younger generations will probably view my perculair communication standards in the same light and humankind pushes ever onward. Oh well, as long they just don't let me down, I'll be okay.

The Economy of Dreams

I frequently have dreams where I find myself in record stores that don't exist in reality. There is one particular record store that I've visited twice, in two different dreams, and which I attempted to visit a third time but could not seem to find the outdoor mall where I knew it to be located. This fictional store was located somewhere in the Interzone area outside New York. It had a brick edifice, was quite spacious, and contained a dynamite selection of albums that have never existed. 

Last night I had a dream about that very same store. Only this time I wasn't inside it, but rather was watching an interview with the owner. As it turned out, the store had closed down. It was the victim of its own success, having attracted other stores to the area and becoming unable to compete. It was quite upsetting. I felt genuine sadness that my favorite dream record shop hadn't survived the economy of my dreamworld. 

In a state of bewilderment, I came across a tiny record store located in a basement store front. It turns out this shop was owned and operated by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, which sounds fantastic, but ended being a disaster. Both of them were in the shop, and it was run like a SNL skit. It didn't actually have any records. In the bins where the records were supposed to be were packages of ramen noodles with band logos on the front. There was also a wide variety of novelty items, which rather than amuse me, made me frustrated. The whole thing was this elaborate joke they had set upon record enthusiasts that caused me to make a scene. Needless to say, I won't be welcome in their shop during future dreams. I guess I'll just have to find that other store I was once at, the one that kept the really great stuff on the second floor...if only I can remember where it's located.

Travels Through Interzone

The moon was full this past week, lending a strange quality to my dreams as always. On more than one occasion, I found myself encountering places that I'd been to before in other dreams. While looking at a subway map, trying to give directions, I remembered to tell my friend to avoid that intricate maze of a station she would encounter at 42nd Street. After all, I'd spent an entire dream trapped in that fictional station earlier this year.

In another dream, I was driving with a friend en route to a record store that I'd been to before, though couldn't remember where it was. I ran through a list of nearby towns, knowing it wasn't in any of them. In the dream, I even called the Missus at her work to ask her if she remembered where the record store was, the one located in the brick fronted shopping center with a canopy walkway, the one with two floors, with "St-Z" being in that weird corner and the vinyl kept upstairs. There was a moment in the dream when I felt maybe I'd only dreamed the store before, but quickly shook that away and proceeded to a town doesn't really exist, only to wake up before ever finding the store.

Why bring this up? Simply because I feel there is an order to the randomness of the world within our dreams. We each have our own personal Interzone that can be mapped and navigated, however unwieldy the logic may seem. In some ways, writing novels is a similar type of chaos. A collection of images, impressions, and fragments of conversation that need pieced together in some semblance of sense. In that way, dreams not only lend inspiration to story, they also serve as an implementation to the process. So for that, I say to you...dream on.

Story Time Tuesday - Rise of the Machines

The other day I dreamt I was watching the world go dark from the safety of an atmosphere in orbit. Looking through the windows, I could see the sprawling complex of grey domes and stretches of concrete promenades. My line of sight was a clear and instinctively I knew this station was sparsely populated.

As the scene pulled back, I stood alongside my two colleagues. A man and a women, both scientists, dressed like Cloud City action figures. Panic set in around us once the android flashed by. A swift, faceless robot made of lean and murderous metal. It had already stabbed most of the staff with arms cut to a sword's end.

Ducking through wide rounded corridors, we're able to hide more than run. But the machines control the locks and our path is quickly cut off, but not until we've made it outside. "I stored something away that can stop it," the man says. His red hair and red beard looking more brown in the strange sunlight as he leads us to a garage. 

Opening the door to the only car in sight, the man pulls forward the back seat. Embedded in the underside is a compacted version of the same deadly robot. He removes a rectangular box and hands it to me. The liquid inside shifts its weight from side to side. "Find a way to pour that on it...it should stop him," he tells me just before a metal spike strikes through him from behind. 

Dream Memories

So it finally happened...a week went by without a post. I'm not sure how that happened, though it's been building toward it. Time has had a way of getting away from me lately. Or more appropriately, I suppose I've been allowing time to take me on its current without fighting the waves as is our usual habit in this modern world.

One thing that has haunted me all week is a dream I had Wednesday night. Every detail was so exact and real. I had flashes of it the entire next day. And more intriguing was the incredible emotional connection I had with one character in the dream, someone who doesn't exist in real life. But in the dream, it was someone I'd known and I had clear memories of this person and our relationship. I've had dream memories before, but never quite so vivid. I could remember circumstances, visits, time spent together, etc. An imagined life to be sure.

The main character in my novel Life is But a Dream has dream memories of someone she's never met. It's a major part of the book. Perhaps it's gotten to that point where my life is now imitating my art rather than other way around. If so, that's not an entirely bad place to be.

Cylon Occupied Nightmares

The past few nights, I've had three dreams where I find myself on Cylon Occupied Caprica after the fall. I'm strangely attached to this abandoned world where life in the twelve colonies came to a sudden end. A world left somewhat intact, but completely unlivable.

The dreams have played out somewhat like video games where I wander, vaguely aware of danger everywhere but encountering very little first hand. And though the dreams have been nightmares, I feel oddly at home on Caprica. Naturally this means I've been watching too much Battlestar Galatica again. But I blame the BBC for that.

I think one of the strongest compliments a writer can get is when a reader admits they had a dream about his or her story. The world you created suddenly feels more real because you know that now it exists in more than one person's imagination. It is no longer just some place you made up--it's a real place where others can go.

I could live in a place like Caprica, but I could never live in a world without fiction.

Inner World

Dreams and writing have always shared a link in my work. It seems that one easily influences the other, not just in images but also in form. I've included dreams I have had into books I've written. I have had dreams where characters I've written become characters in a dream.

Both writing and dreams attempt to create worlds that don't exist. Recently I've noticed that some elements of my narrative style are showing up in dreams. I've always written extended metaphors into my books by using small details that occur and reoccur in different ways. I'm finding something similar happening in my dreams lately.

A few repeating elements have sprung up in otherwise unrelated dreams. There's the ancient pyramid and spire temple located on a hill behind the buildings lining 57th Street in Manhattan that can only be glimpsed from certain angles. There's the dream apartment that my one friend has had in several dreams, located in the same dream part of the city. Whenever I dream about my yard, the landscape isn't at all as it really is, yet it's frequently altered in the same way. It's as if my dreams are attempting to write a serial novel. I'm interested to see where it goes.

I think the connection between dreams and my work is easily explained. The imagination has a natural inclination for story telling. Writing is simply a tool by which to provide it structure.

You Can't Get There From Here

I can't prove anything, but I'm pretty sure I was incepted this weekend.

During a dream, my mind was close to figuring out that it was a dream but the dream kept throwing obstacles in my way. It all started with a drive away from the house where I grew up. Now I was a little thrown off by all the added railroad tracks and slightly scorched appearance of the nearby houses, but my first real clue that something was wrong didn't come until I turned out of the development and found myself immediately on the interstate.

That's not where it's supposed to be, I thought as I now watched the car from high above.

My passengers, also observers, assure me that they've made some changes since last I drove.

Fine. I'll go with it.

The next thing I know, we are very far away in a very short time. I keep insisting to everyone else in the dream that it didn't take as long as it should to get there. Sitting in this strange house now, feeling a sense of conspiracy, I figure out that I can add up the times from the songs that played on my iPod during the drive and prove that it only took a few minutes.

My sister is there and she agrees to help. I'm reading off the track times and she's plugging them into the calculator on an iPad (I think this dream was sponsored by Apple, or incepted by Apple). As I'm reading the track times, out of nowhere a nurse steps into the room and calls my sister back to see the doctor.

Doctor? What the hell?

I take her iPad and plan to get to the bottom of this myself. Of course, there are about six million applications open and I can't find the calculator. Another roadblock. Forget it, I decide I'll do it by hand. But as I'm adding up times, all of the sudden all of these songs show up on the playlist that I don't remember hearing. I theorize that perhaps I fell asleep during the drive, but figure the passengers would have told me since I was driving.

I know something's up. Something is wrong. The inceptors must realize I'm close because in comes a little girl with a zombie doll to distract me from this train of thought once and for all. There's no telling what worthless information they stole from my brain after that.

Beware all...the dream stealers have awoken.

When the Strange Snow Fell

Strange snow falls in a strange dream.

It never touches my skin,

and on my tongue

more like ash than snow.

The streetlight just below the hill

is closer than I remember.

And our house was never this near to the ocean in winter.

But everything changes, here

where the snow falls like stars

with smaller ones in orbit.

The path is covered over and white.

The trees are only hints,

hiding behind the electric glare.

We make a new way through the night,

using our coats as sleds and our arms to row,

knowing wherever it takes us, it will be somewhere new.

Sleepwalking

The place I go to dream is the same place I go for stories. Writing after all isn't much more than organized daydreaming. Dreams have always played an important role in my writing process. There are many scenes in my novels that are basically dreams I had and adapted to the story.

Whenever I wake from a particularly vivid dream, I scramble in the dark for the pen and paper by my bed and scribble madly all that I can remember. Then I usually spend the next morning figuring out which pieces are usable for which projects. Last night was one of the rare cases when a dream offered me major breakthroughs on two separate projects I'm working on.

Next time I feel like a nap, I think I'll convince myself that I'm really working. I realized also that I can write remarkably well in the dark, wonder if that's a skill I could add to my resume?

Remembered From A Dream

Sometime near 6:00 AM:

A sick person lies on the ground of a hospital waiting room adorned in the dark colors of late '70's furniture and the dawn light streaming through the window. A fairy flutters over the sick patient as the nurses behind the reception desk glance over their shoulders, uninterested. I watch fascinated as the fairy breathes into the mouth of the patient and I see their body turn into rainbow striped glass. The fairy touches the patients belly button and the glass shatters into uncountable pieces. "It was their time," the nurse says to me and I nod, speechless at the beautiful horror.

All in a Dream

A few months ago, I had a dream that really felt like a great Middle Grade novel. Of course, I wrote it down in as much detail as possible. This story has been brewing since then. I've been compiling notes and pictures and whatever else seemed to fit. All of these have been stuck in a folder and growing. It's really a story I want to tackle sooner rather than later.

Last night, the idea revisited my dreams at a later point in the story and really did a lot to develop the overall picture. The characters were more complete and vocal and there was a connection there. I knew them. Two dreams...now I'm onto something.

So We Meet Again...

The other night, one of my characters visited me in my dream. This isn't the first time this character has shown up. She's tenacious. In fact, I mentioned a previous meeting last September in a post. Now that I've gone back to rework her story, she decided pay another visit.

It took place in a restaurant that seemed like a cross between our world and hers. I was there with my family, who seemed to know my character was there waiting for our arrival. There was a bit of that Middle School, being set up in the cafeteria, kind of nervousness in my stomach as she waved at me to sit beside her. I guess it was my subconscious worrying that the book was no good and that she was going to let me hear about it.

My fears proved unfounded as she was fairly excited to see me. "I can't believe you wrote a whole book about me," she said. "Where I live, I never even get a postcard and now I have a whole book!" Of course she was correct, where she lives, there are no postcards. Then she showed me some magical drawing she'd made that became animated as we looked at.

I would've liked to chat some more, but alas my cat scratched the back of my head and brought me out of my slumber. This is only fitting as I had bestowed this peculiarity to her cat in the novel from the opening paragraph. If we are not fated to meet again, at least I got her stamp of approval.

Dreaming of Wonderland

It's been an amazing dream week for me. Following an animated dream (a rarity) the other day, and a flying dream (just as rare), last night I was rewarded with a Dream of Wonderland, a place I've hardly ever visited.

Things there weren't so pleasant in Wonderland. Everything was a little off and totalitarian. There was this dark-haired little girl creating everything with her imagination. She was pretending to be my friend, but I could sense she was evil, or trying to trick me, and that I knew I was being held in this ever expanding Emerald City kind of building for something devious.

Certain that I was to be boiled alive, I decided to flee. I found that when I out-raced her imagination, I discovered flaws in the scenery...parts unfinished...deformed characters...that type of Coraline-esque thing. I eventually escaped only to find the card soldiers in my own front lawn. I followed them to the elaborate Martian-like rock pit that magically appeared at would-be the top of my driveway. The formerly flat card soldiers were then transformed into old men set to judge me. They had conducted a computerized vote over radio waves. All of the evil girl's imagined people voted and I was guilty of course. Of course, the ruling was initially "Off with his head" which they chanted in sunstroke laziness. Before my execution, I somehow managed to sink through the center of the sunlight that blazed upon us.

I woke into another dream. This time I was in a flea market type boardwalk carnival setting. I saw the evil girl again, this time dressed in one of those cheap Disney Snow White costumes. She was very nice. She offered me a hot dog. Like Alice, I realized it must have been a dream.

Why do I share this? After all, nobody likes to read about dreams. But if you kept with it, I'll tell you. You see, several key elements of this dream were directly influenced from scenes in my new novel. Dreams have always been deeply connected to my writing. I often use elements from my dreams in novels. As a reward, I often have the joy of getting some of novels in the form of dreams.

I truly believe Wonderland exists. I don't think Lewis Carroll invented it. He simply gave a name to the place where our imaginations spring from.