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Dreams as a Sleeping/More Creative Life
Dreams are powerful experiences, at least in my life. I often kid that I don’t read horror novels or watch scary movies because my nightmares are free (and forced on me). I’m sure Stephen King could have a field day with my subconscious’ meanderings; from horrible rites of death to gruesome imagery, my dreams often leave me terrified to go back to sleep, even at close to 30 years old. I could probably make money off these dreams if I wrote ’em down and made ’em into a book…but I’d probably go mad trying to write it all. LOL!
But as scary as my dreams can be sometimes, they also can be veritable reservoirs of creativity. During the night, your mind isn’t as constrained by what is “right” and “proper,” what is “beautiful” and “pleasing,” and sometimes you end up with powerful imagery and plotlines that are just crazy enough to work.
Creativity & Dreams through History
Many artists of every type have harvested their dreams for inspiration in their works. One of the more famous stories of a dream inspiring creativity is that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet of the Romantic era (1800s), who woke from an opium-induced dream and wrote one of his poetic masterworks, “Kubla Khan.”
We, too, can use dreams as a jumping-off point for our creativity (even without pharmaceutical help 😉 ); if we can allow ourselves to dream, we can allow ourselves to reach ideas we haven’t even TRIED to play with before.
Harvesting Creativity from Dreams
- First, you’ve got to have a really intense dream. Positive or negative, lovely or scary, whatever it is, usually the most intense dreams translate the best into waking creativity.
- When you wake, write down everything you remember from the crazy dream you experienced last night–don’t leave out any detail, as silly as it might seem!
Don’t try to make sense of any of the images, or try to make it into a “sensible” story yet. If it happened in your dream, write it.
- Don’t let anything interrupt you, at all, till you’re finished. Coleridge, according to the popular story, answered the door in the middle of his poem, and when he returned to his desk, the dream had fully evaporated. “Kubla Khan” looks like a finished masterpiece, but in reality it was probably only a quarter complete.
Whether this anecdote is true or not, dreams do tend to fade very quickly after waking. Don’t let this happen to you…capture as much of it as possible!
- Later in the day, go back and see what the meat of your dream is. Pick out imagery that really stood out to you; pick out characters that intrigued you, delighted you, even frightened you. Anything about the dream that really hit you, really made you FEEL and EXPERIENCE the dream, is worth thinking more about.
- Transform this raw material into any form of creativity you wish–a song, an instrument solo, a short story, a painting, a play, even a dance. Use those characters, that imagery, that feeling, whatever it was, to carry your idea forth in a way you may have never expected to do so.
Most Importantly, Have Fun!
Don’t worry about making this dream-creation “good” or “interesting to others”–primarily, enjoy your creative inspiration as your own, even if you weren’t aware that you were creating it! To embrace your creativity, your ability to MAKE cool stuff up, you first have to accept that you CAN do it…and your dreams give you the perfect license to do it.