Posts Tagged Dreams

In every house that I have lived in, there is a room that isn’t there.  It shows up, without fail, in every dream I have that takes place in those houses, in such extreme, realistic, technicolor detail to the point that part of me still expects to find those rooms even when I am awake.

In my mother’s house, it was an entire extra invisible floor. By day, my mom’s house was an ordinary one-story ranch. By night, a staircase exists where my closet used to be, and up those stairs is a large room with gleaming wooden floors, a slanting ceiling, and dormer windows.  When I was a child, this room was filled with my favorite toys.  As a teenager, the toys gave way to electronics, as an adult, well, the electronics stayed, but they made way for several large shelves full of books. But some things always remained constant: the light golden wood of the floors, the cream colored walls, an antique standing mirror in a corner, ballet barres lining the two longest walls, and a large fluffy bed that hung from the ceiling.  Looking out of the dormer windows would give me exactly the sort of view I would have expected to see, had I been sitting on the roof of the real house.  The dimensions and layout of the room were so precise, and so accurate, and so real in my mind that this room always felt real to me, even as I would open my closet doors and find only clothes, no stairway.

It didn’t take long after I moved into my new house for it, too, to gain an Invisible Room.  In this case, it is an extra kitchen, situated somewhere between my living room and the back bedroom (now the cats’ playroom).  I have to step down several steps into this kitchen, and it is decorated as if it had come straight from the seventies, all in golds and browns with golden stained butcher block countertops and brown linoleum, elderly appliances and potholders that were either crocheted or woven on those square potholder looms that we all had as children.  A brown, round formica table with metal legs sits in the far corner near a window-wall that opens out onto a patio that also does not exist in reality.  Over the table hangs a macrame-encased basket holding a spider fern.

In neither case are these invisible rooms “dream” rooms. They aren’t rooms I ever particularly wanted, just rooms that, when I went to sleep, my brain seemed convinced actually did exist in my house.  Except for the hanging bed, most of the contents of the rooms are things I 1. already had or 2. don’t particularly want in the first place. They are not particularly special in any way. In my mom’s house I already had two bedrooms to call my own, I certainly didn’t need a third. And while, in my own house, I might occasionally wish for a bigger kitchen, I definitely wouldn’t decorate my dream kitchen in brown and gold, with brown appliances that look older than I am.

I try to remember the rules these rooms have taught me, in my writing. The things that have made them so real that even when awake, some part of me expects to find them where they are in my dreams.  It’s always in the small details, the things which make a setting come alive in the reader’s mind, allows us to picture in detail a huge castle like Hogwarts, or the tiniest of hobbit houses.

I know I can’t be the only person whose mind invents rooms that aren’t there, but there are other things that might have gained a permanent foothold in our dreams that don’t exist in real life. Have your dreams added rooms to your houses, or members to your families, or passages to places you’ve never been?

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I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. I just can’t keep up with it, and it seems rather silly to write down “everyday days” (ie. Those days that are just like the days before them in that you go to work, you do work, you go home, you feed the cats, you veg for two hours, you go to bed.)

I do, however, keep notebooks. Everywhere.  I keep one in my purse, I keep one in my car, I keep one in the kitchen (generally for writing down recipes I make up on the fly that turned out to actually taste surprisingly good), and I keep several beside my bed.  These tend to be written and ordered in a way that I am fairly certain that only I would understand . . . just as only my grandfather could understand his office “filing system.”

Because, in my way, these journals are my filing system. A filing system for Brain Blurts. Because for some reason, my best and most original ideas seem to come when 1. I am trying to get to sleep; 2. I am asleep; or 3. I’m lying half-drowsy in the morning and petting my kitties.

If I don’t write these ideas down, they get lost.  Along with the good ideas, there are the really weird ones.  Those get written down too, because sometimes the really weird ones are the ones that actually work, when you get down to writing.

Of course sometimes, when I am stressed, my poor beleaguered brain will bless me with The Crossover From Hell. The dream where you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself “WTF is wrong with you, girl?”

Most recently, I somehow ended up with a MacGyver, Stargate: SG1, (new) Battlestar Gallactica crossover. With glitter.  The glitter was important. It was a new cylon detecting device.  I have also previously endured an NCIS/Marvel Universe/Doctor Who crossover where I ended up being rescued from a crowd of Marvel Villains and Cybermen . . . by being thrown off of the roof of a building into a pool of marshmallow fluff (which might actually add a Ghostbusters element to the dream, too).

Ridiculous, I know.  But even in the most ridiculous dreams, I have on occasion found good writing ideas, and not for fanfiction, even when the dreams in question might involve fandoms.  Because sometimes those fandoms are just shorthand – your brain’s way of giving you some recognizable thing to hold onto in the middle of the nonsense.

I’ve even found some serious, not ridiculous stories in the most unlikely dreams.  So I keep track of them. Even if, when I go back and read them, they make no sense whatsoever. Every dream won’t be useful, after all . . . but sometimes the dream you think the least useful turns out to be just the one you need most.

It’s important to keep track of things, no matter where you get your ideas, and no matter how ridiculous those ideas might seem at the time that you get them. After all, you never know when, somewhere in some future story, you might just need to rescue your protagonist by throwing them into a giant bowl of marshmallow fluff.

I’m a little late posting today because of a couple of reasons…first, my only coworker had jury duty so my downtime today was zilch, and I spent what little time there was over on My Tweeple removing twitter spammers from my follows.

Twitter‘s such an awesome thing – as long as you do a little pruning now and then.

I had the *strangest* dream over the weekend.  It just sort of stuck in my head as vivid as if it had actually happened.  It involved me, my mother, a motorcycle, and a fox.

My mother hates motorcycles. Thinks they’re dangerous death machines or something.  So you can probably imagine my surprise when, in my dream, she pulled up in front of my house in a custom pink, glittery chopper with a sidecar, declaring that we were going on a shopping trip to Augusta.