Dreams

There was a scene in Inception when Dominick Cobb (the main character whose aim is to plant or extract information from people in their dreams) walks into a room with people who are heavily sedated on a drug that allows one to live within a dream for a time. That scene resonated with me, mostly because I enjoy spending long, uninterrupted bouts of time in dreams. My system to both experience vivid dreams and remember them on a regular basis works as follows: fall asleep when I'm dead tired with a notepad next to my bed. Yes, it's very sophisticated. This normally induces quick onset of REM, which has a higher probability of causing dreams than non-REM. Then upon waking, I quickly jot down everything I can remember. It is interesting not only what we dream about, but how quickly remembering dreams can lead to sequential dream recall and confusing dreams with memories.

Sequential dream recall involves remembering one dream and then rapidly remember a series of others. For example, I had an extremely vivid dream about a journey that starts in a arid city (think Phoenix) then progresses to me riding a motorcycle west across the desert. Normally this then induces recall of another dream in which I am in a forest with everything surrounded in a soft glow and there is essentially a straight path that leads me through several small villages then into a confrontation against a shape-shifting...thing. Afterwards I'm on a train riding through the Black Forests with winged people dying around me as armed soldiers gun us down. When everyone else is dead, a beautiful lady appears, she's dressed in black robes accented with red and carries a massive scythe. I must do battle, but have no weapons on hand. And then another dreams pops into my head. For some dreams, the connections are obvious: they are related in spatial arrangement, characters involved or the general sequence of events. But other times, there is no obvious connection. Recording down a plethora of dreams may reveal hidden connections.

But while dreams can be problematic, they give birth to a lot of mind-bendingly awesome worlds, stories and characters. It is sometimes hard, when someone ask about a dream you had, to relay the essence of what happened. I have begun writing up a large compilation of dreams in an attempt to do just that. I have visited wondrous worlds with islands in the sky and the forlorn plains of a dying planet filled with monstrous creatures and abandoned structures so far-fetched that it would take a page just to describe them. By writing down every detail right after it happens, I will have a better chance of capturing the feeling that the dream induced and the vision and message that each contains.

The plan is to clean-up the notes I take about each dream and make them more coherent. Afterwards, the dreams will be stitched together and a novella written where a group of characters explores the dream-worlds, with maybe a bit of overarching story to keep things interesting. We'll see.