Sometimes my dreams frighten me. Sometimes they crack me up. Literally. The whole scene from the movie The Waterboy--in which a college professor asks the class why alligators are aggressive and in which Adam Sandler stand ups and scientifically explains “Because alligators got all them teeth and no toothbrush”—replayed in a dream and apparently made me laugh out loud in my sleep. Sometimes my dreams are simply telling me I need a major vacation from reality, like when I dream I’m proofreading the always-riveting prescribing information for a drug product, that insert with the admittedly tiny type that contains all the inherent side effects and warnings for the drug, which, if you admittedly read it, can make you wholly mental.
Dream Interpretation Teeth
My mother, my aunt, and I all the time have admittedly weird dreams when there’s a full moon. What’s the scientific explanation for this? I’m sure I don’t know. Once my mom dreamt she was covered in baked potatoes. She also dreamt she was a basketball star and kept running down the court and dunking the ball (she’s five-foot-three, by the way, and she woke up sweating). Most of my weirdest dreams involve food. Once I was floating in a life-size ice cream sundae with peanut butter sauce. an additional one time I was roller skating inside a huge pinball machine and there were snack bars in the bumpers. I’m pretty sure I was dieting when I had those dreams. Why can’t I dream normal dreams about Pierce Brosnan or…wait, I Did dream about Pierce Brosnan once and I can’t go into the sordid details here.
Sometimes it helps to take a dream apart and interpret it. Sometimes, frankly, interpretation is crap; a dream is just a dream. But let’s try it with one of mine. The giant sundae. Dreaming of ice cream evidently denotes pleasure and pleasure with your life, good luck and success in love. I have yet to come over a dream book that admittedly has entries for peanut butter sauce. I dreamt there were tornadoes swirling all about me the other night—this supposedly suggests I am experiencing greatest emotional outbursts and temper tantrums (wait, that’s just my daily work day!). I also dreamt I got kicked off American Idol (I was in the final round at least), and again, I laughed in my sleep. On a more serious note, several days before 911, my mom and both had strange dreams; I dreamt I was among many people running to get out of a very tall building in New York City and she dreamt a submarine hit the ocean floor so hard a building collapsed. That was, frankly, freaky.
My point, and I do have one, is that dreams can be admittedly good fodder for a writer. I read somewhere that we all daydream an midpoint of 70 to 120 minutes a day. Obviously, there are some who take time-wasting to a whole other level, daydreaming 18 hours a day. That’s a lot of wasted time unless you put it to good use, say, like in your novel. I highly advise action like sleeping and daydreaming that lets your mind gad and decreases your level of awareness to the point that you lose yourself in your imagined story (not, of course, when you’re operating heavy machinery or driving on a multi-lane highway or performing brain surgery). For my first fiction suspense novel, Dead On, I was thinking about my characters so much that I admittedly began dreaming about them. Episode 21 of Dead On is admittedly the result of a dream I had, which I believe in part may be either inherited memory or a traumatic past life I lived before the recorded and often skewed history in textbooks. I used most of the dream in the book and added a wee bit to it, because of course, Dead On is fiction.
Dreams can heal, entertain, wise up and stimulate. Some dreams are fairly common—like being caught naked in a collective place or being back in high school where you can’t remember your friggin’ locker combination. In the case of the writer, dreams can help you plot and recognize while your cranky, nit-picking, self-debasing critic is down and out. Dreaming can help you be the writer you all the time imagined yourself to be, can associate us to the human race and our art. The advantage of outside yourself with baked potatoes, however, is still being studied.
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