Writing your dreams

Excerpted and edited from a 2005 YWP aricle
By T. Alan Broughton

• Your dreams can inspire your writing; use your imagination to turn real experiences into fictional moments, images, and stories.

• Begin with what you want or need to write, not with someone else's ideas.
• Use words and language to intrigue your reader.
• Keep a notebook by your bed to write down your dreams, and be open to surprises.

Using your dreams to create

Because we dream, every night all of us are making poems and stories. Even if we don’t remember most of our dreams, we make them because we have to. Just as we need great poems and stories to help us understand our natures and our places in the world, each of us has to dream, and scientists have discovered that we will be very disoriented if we are prevented from dreaming.

Dreams can show us how poems and stories are made and how they are made convincingly.

Dreams are not abstractions. They are concrete, specific enactments. We experience dreams; they are not explained to us. The essential act of dreaming is immersion in a detailed world of what we know through our senses.

Note how the dreaming mind moves from association to association. We are yoking things together in ways that reason often does not, a process of making metaphors.

Because of this, dreams are very economical. They leave out as much as they include, suggest rather than expound. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson writes in a poem. Willa Cather, speaking of short stories, reminds us that “whatever is felt on the page without being specifically named there – that, one might say, is created.”

Since you do it every night, dreams should give you great faith in your ability to use your own experience to make a poem or story.

But notice how even the dream is freed from the literal or historical circumstances of your life. It uses whatever scraps or fragments it needs to make an effective dream, sometimes transforming what you lived into nearly unrecognizable moments. Think of this as your imagination at work, and take that same freedom of transformation into the making of poems and stories. To begin with what you have experienced is good advice, but changing that to make a poem or story work is essential also.

An important difference between dreams and poems/stories, is that dreams are private. They don’t have to mean something to anyone but you.

To complete the act of writing, you need a reader, and if you want someone to read what you have written, you will need to take your “dream” that is a poem or story and make crucial decisions about its details. You need to decide which details work best together, which are unnecessary. What will make the piece come together as a little world of its own rather than a series of effective but unrelated moments?

You have to begin with a core that is very much what you want or need to write, just as you would find little help in lying down at night and dreaming someone else’s dream, but in a poem or story you are trying to make an experience that can be shared. You are asking the reader to dream your dream, so you have to take your fellow dreamer into account and seduce him/her into your written dream.

This is the function of words, the common property of us all. Poems and stories are only words. A dream is a very rich experience that can use all you have experienced and stored with an immediacy that even the best poems and stories can only imitate. If you are going to be a writer, you will have to dedicate yourself to a lifelong immersion not just in using words, but discovering them in all the places you can find: great literature, the spoken language, dictionaries, other languages used as ways to understand better how your own works.

Some tips on capturing dreams for future writing:

Keep a notebook by your bedside. When you wake from a dream, write down what you can, not in generalizations, but in its details without even naming the effects of them. Don’t wait till morning because dreams are elusive. Try taking this dream and making it into a piece of writing, using the ways dreams work as guidelines. Leave yourself plenty of time to revise, and if you find yourself leaving the dream behind, go where the poem needs to go. Maybe the dream was just the right place to start.

Watch for surprises. Sometimes dreams reveal things to us we did not know we knew. They surprise us into seeing, remind us that most of the time we are going through the day using our brains only to survive the surface concerns we have to deal with. I think the poems and stories that will please you most will be the ones that reveal new understandings to you.

But beware: When you see these surprises, these new understandings you may never want to stop writing.