I dreamt the other night that I travelled to the future through a magical water portal. I was swimming, and a crappy 80s synth band played by the pool, and then I was in a motel room in the future. My parents who were not my parents had died in a bizarre industrial garbage disposal accident orchestrated by evil baddies. Some very suspicious government people needed my genes for the survival of the human race, and they wanted me to do something horrible but I'm not sure what it was. I agreed, because I wanted them to send me back to the past, because the future was that awful. Pretty weird.
I mentioned this on Facebook (as you do), and Shirley Marr (the effortlessly cool author of Fury) suggested that I may have found my newest book idea. And so I got to thinking - do creative people, writers and so forth, dream more than others? Can one turn a wacky dream into an actual plot? (My dreams tend to push the boundaries in terms of believability, obviously - there's often a lot of magical transforming, and bodies of water appearing where bodies of water do not belong, and so forth, as dreams are wont to do - but maybe there's a grain of sand on the whole beach that is a bizarre dream that can be turned into something else.)
And another, slightly less scary dream, that I recorded on Facebook last year (because where else would you talk about weird dreams!), that I thought I'd share: I dreamt last night that I was in a botanical gardens/outdoor shopping centre type place, and my family were getting dental work done, and there was a sort of masquerade ball going on which I wasn't allowed into. So I was out on the lawn with all these characters from Harry Potter having magical duels. And then I went for a stroll with a guy called Thom Yorke (but it wasn't Thom Yorke of Radiohead), and he had an umbrella, despite it being night-time and not raining. We had an enlightening conversation about Julian Assange and realities not measuring up to expectations. He looked like somebody I knew, but I think it was somebody dream-me knew rather than real-me, so it must be somebody who isn't real.
So I'm wondering, if you're a writer, do you dream a lot, and often remember those dreams? Have you ever turned a dream into a novel or short story?
