Laura Raquel

For most of my life I’ve had crazy dreams. Dreams that really don’t make sense and are often more confusing than a mashup of Shel Silverstein poetry and Dr. Seuss characters.

For instance, I’ll give you an example from a weird dream I can STILL remember from a couple of years ago. I don’t know what I was doing in the dream, but I woke up being deathly terrified of an orange pool noodle shaped like an otherwise cute animal (seriously, it was like a sea-horse or something) and I vividly remember thinking that if that pool noodle found me I’d be dead. Weird.

Also, another freakish example of my late night brain shenanigans: I was on a cruise with my family and before I could go ashore I had to buy all new clothes from the cruise ship mall and eat my biscuits before the deflated shark on the pool deck got to them first. Yeah, like I said, kind of strange.

And these dream musings lead me to think about a few things…

1. Haven’t I always heard that people dream in black & white?
2. Is there some possible way I can harvest the creativity in my dreams and use them in my writing?
3. Do I have such strange dreams because I’m a freak?

So I did some internet probing to figure out what was up with my preconceived notion about B&W dreams. And this is what I found. (Actually, I found a lot of things, but most were hokey-looking sites, and this seemed  kinda/sorta/hopefully legit.) It’s an interesting snippet saying that people used to think they dreamed in B&W, but that may have been strongly influenced by their B&W media. Now they think the majority of people dream in color. I know I dream in color because it’s usually a central part of my dreams…like that orange pool noodle, or that pink floral & denim dress I had to buy from the cruise ship mall.

Also, I’ve heard about some authors who are directly influenced by their dreams and use some of that material for their writing. And I’m always so jealous. This seemed like such a cool idea. But if you’ll kindly recall the two snippets of dreams I described for you…you can see why this would just make all my novels awkward.

It’s a little strange, because I’ve often had dreams that are super epic when I’m asleep and the back of my mind is making comments like: “When you wake this up, you should write this down, it’d make a great story.” or “Make sure you remember this, it’d be a super duper fantastic plot twist!” and other happy thoughts. But when I wake up and actually remember my dream it’s not super epic, it’s usually horribly lackluster. I really wish I could use this fountain of creativity for my writing…but it’s too bizarre to filter out anything worthwhile.

Also, have you ever been so caught up in a dream that when you finally wake up your mind has trouble distinguishing what’s reality and what’s fantasy? Because I’ve done that. And it’s kind of annoying because it leaves me with this cryptic sense of deja vu for the rest of the day.

So what about you? Strange dreams? Creepy dreams? Funny dreams? No dreams?