Dream Girl

Prompt: He was stunned – the stranger in front of him looked exactly like the girl he’d been dreaming about.

Roger tossed and turned. In his dream the woman smiled at him, twisted sinuously around him in a seductive dance. She whirled away and then vanished in a puff of smoke. He called to her but she was gone, leaving him filled with longing.

He woke up with a start, staring around wildly as his heart rate began to slow. He was alone in his room, the same as always. With a curse at his own foolishness, he got up and prepared to start his day.

“It’s a little different every time,” he told his friend Ben, “I mean, we meet in different ways and the details change, but it’s always the same woman.”

Ben eyed him for a minute. “This must be some chick to get you so worked up.”

“Yeah, she really is.”

“So don’t leave me hanging, man. What does she look like?”

“She’s tall, but not too tall,” Roger said in a dreamy voice. “Legs up to here and a perfect figure. Long dark hair and eyes you can see the universe in.”

Ben rolled his eyes, but had to ask, “And you have no idea who this chick is?”

“No,” Roger said with a sigh. “But I’d sell my soul to find out.”

The work day seemed to drag on, as was usual in the accounting firm Roger worked for. The end of the day finally came and Roger fought the traffic all the way to his condo.

There was a message on the answering machine from his mother, reminding him of his father’s upcoming 65th birthday party on the weekend. The other two calls were hang-ups, probably telemarketers, he reflected as he fixed himself his habitual after dinner drink.

“What a life,” he mused, as he loosened his tie and make himself comfortable on the couch. “Work, home, the occasional date, and twice a month dinners with the parents.”

The only highlight was the dreams he was having lately. He raised his glass high. “Here’s to you, sweetheart, whoever you are.”

He was working on his second drink when there was a knock on the door. Roger answered the door and just stood there. He was stunned – the stranger in front of him looked exactly like the girl he’d been dreaming about. No, not girl, she was all woman.

“Well, are you just going to stand there staring, or are you going to let me in, Roger?” she asked in a voice that sent a shiver through him.

It never occurred to him to wonder how she knew who he was as he stood back to let her in.

“Who—what—how—” He couldn’t seem to get a coherent sentence out.

“You did say something about selling your soul to meet me, didn’t you?”

He nodded mutely.

“Well, I have your contract right here,” she said, handing him a rolled parchment that seemed to appear out of thin air. Her eyes began to glow red as he eagerly took the pen from her.

Inspiration From Dreams

There was probably as much, if not more, talking than writing in this class, for what are writers if not dreamers?

We started out this class by going around the table and sharing some of our dreams. A lively discussion ensued over some of the particulars, and some of the common aspects to be found in dreams.

Maybe it was because we’re all writers, but I was a little surprise that there were a lot of common themes in our dreams. Our dreams also tended to be vivid and a little on the dark side. And of course we were given time to write down a dream to share. Here’s mine:

A pandemic virus was systematically wiping out mankind. Only those with a certain genetic marker would survive. I was in Toronto with my granddaughter where we were supposed to be able to get help – my daughter had stayed behind to look after her father and her husband.

There was rioting in the cities. Most of them were gone. I don’t know why Toronto, or at least the part of it we were in, was still accessible.

We were wandering the halls of a hospital – it was very crowded. I’m not sure how I knew, but I realized the nice people who appeared to be helping everyone, were actually separating those that appeared to have the genetic marker from those who didn’t.

There was an overly friendly woman – like one of those falsely, overly cheerful people who want you to join their cult. She wanted me to take my granddaughter to this compound. She assured me we’d be safe there, but I somehow knew they were gathering people for experimentation.

I pretended to be excited about the prospect, and persuaded her to let me go back for my daughter and other (non-existent) female members of my family. I guess they got credit or something for anyone they coerced into getting on one of the buses because she was more than happy to wait for me to bring the rest of my family.

It wasn’t easy to leave the city. Abandoned vehicles lined the streets and we had to avoid military like patrols who were searching for survivors to take to the compound. We weren’t the only ones who knew the compound was a bad place, we came across other healthy people who were also avoiding the patrols.

We made our way back home only to find the males of our family were dead – my husband and all of his family, and my daughter’s husband. We knew we weren’t safe where we were and decided to make our way to New Brunswick where my sister was. For some unknown reason, it was a safe haven.

After sharing the dreams we wrote down, we talked about methods for remembering dreams and ways dreams can aid in the writing process. Here are a few things we came up with:

Keep your story in mind as you fall asleep.
Use lucid dreaming techniques
“Sleeping on it” really can solve problems.
Set an alarm to wake yourself up during REM sleep.
Look for the elements in your dream that work – a theme or a feeling. You don’t have to use every part of your dream.
When you wake up, you have only a few seconds to remember your dream before it’s lost. If you leave the bedroom, “passing the threshold” as it were, you won’t remember. So stay on this side of the threshold.
Write down your dream while you’re still in bed.
Dream imagery can provide the weirdness that takes a story in a new direction.
Day dreaming can be used as a space for writing.
There is a lot of overlap between how to write and how to dream.

If you’d like to delve a little further into the subject of dreams and writing, here are a few links to check out:

How to Use Your Dreams to Inspire Your Fiction
Dream a Little Dream: Using Dreams in Literature
Deep Lucid Dreaming – wake up in your dreams for a happier, more creative life
Do You Dream In Paragraphs? Mine Your Dreams For Writing Ideas
Use Your Dreams to Be Endlessly Creative


Bartelomeo Cristofori dreamed ... and invented the piano.

Infernal Interfering Ideas

Two weeks in a row with the blog posts. Can you stand it? LOL

So ... a funny thing happened on the way to making progress with An Elemental Spirit, and I'm not talking about the increase of day job work either. Quite frankly, that doesn't really interfere with the writing time at all. It just killed my mindless gaming time. Which is a good thing, trust me. :-)

No, what's interfering with An Elemental Spirit is ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. *sigh*

It's my own fault really. I have the base of operations for my heroes of the Ardraci series set aboard the firefighter class starship Valkyrie, which is a ship that's going to have its own trilogy eventually (one of which is written) and a couple of stand alone books (another one of which is written). Anyway, I started Spirit aboard the Valkyrie and before I knew what was happening I started writing a bunch of back story about the whole freaking history of the universe.

Now that in itself isn't a bad thing, but I checked a couple of facts in the trilogy, which takes place before the Ardraci series, and things don't quite line up. And the real problem is, the facts I came up for Spirit are better than the facts I had in the first Valkyrie book. So now I'm having to re-think the beginning of Spirit, and figuring out how to re-write the Valkyrie book to include these new ideas.

So while I'm pondering all these new ideas and what to do with them, I've gone back to work on Wishing Star 1. See, I'd left it temporarily 'cause I couldn't figure out how to keep my heroine, Eva, from finding out that that lion she's traveling with is a shapeshifter and yet still have them develop a relationship.

And then I got an idea.

They could meet in dreams. A dream like this one:

Eva was walking slowly along a beach. It was night and the moon was full, its light sparkling on the water lapping at the shore. The sand was cool, tickling her toes, which made her smile. A warm breeze played with her hair and there was a scent of flowers in the air.

The moonlight picked out another figure on the beach, some distance ahead. Though too far away to be more than just a vague shape, she knew instinctively that it was a man, just as she knew she had nothing to fear from him. He was waiting for her.

As she drew nearer she could see he was tall and lean, but gave the impression of great strength. His skin was sun bronzed and his hair was long and dark. There was some kind of tribal tattoo on his left pectoral, disappearing over his shoulder but the moonlight was behind him and it was indistinct. He wore nothing but a loin cloth and it was at that moment she realized she was dressed in a sarong that fell to mid-thigh.

She stopped walking when she reached him. He was unfamiliar, and yet she knew him. "Who are you?" she asked.

"My name is Aiden."

His voice was deep and smooth, and sent a shiver right through her.

"Is this a dream?"

"Of course it is."

"I know you ... somehow I know you. How is this possible?"

"Perhaps we knew each other in another lifetime, or another dream."

Eva reached up and touched his face. "You're my jungle lord."

"Yes," he said.

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her, a kiss that coursed through her like fire, leaving no part of her unscorched. She pressed closer, needing ... needing something but she couldn't say what.

Not bad for a first encounter, eh?

"To sleep, perchance to dream ..."

Through dreams Aiden can give her important information, like what plants are safe to eat, he can show her how to use the flint and steel she was given 'cause she has no clue what they're for, and, of course, they can grow closer. Which will make it all the more shocking when they meet in person.

Ideas.

You gotta love them. Even if they do interfere once in awhile. ;-)