I'm a dreamer. And when I say that, I mean it literally. I'm one of those who dreams at night, and often remembers the dreams when I wake. Not that they make sense. My dreams, for the most part, are fairly obvious ones plucked from my psyche - such as the recurring one I have every five or six years. The dream where I'm living in one of my childhood homes, the one that it hurt to move from, a thirteen room Victorian where we left behind many possessions and what we thought our family would be, for a three bedroom apartment and a new way forward. Those dreams bring in people from my present, long deceased pets, and long forgotten relics of my childhood.The dreams's meaning is clear, the issues not even unresolved anymore. Now the dream visits me in a nostalgic glow. Now and then I have a nightmare and scare my husband awake with a cry in the night, or worse, only wake myself, and I lie next to him, tense and frightened, wishing he might stop snoring and hold me. Other dreams are just plain weird, random bits of my day pulled from the miscellaneous file of my subconscious.
But this morning I awoke from the type of dream I've always wanted to have. I dreamt a story. A story I wanted to write, plot rolling out from my mind as I lay in that semi-conscious state, characters, if not fully formed, at least made of enough flesh and heart for me to carry them forward into the light of day.
Most mornings, I am cursing my alarm clock, turning away from the sunlight peeking in my window, reaching for a few last minutes, even seconds, of sleep. And then I'm up, no time for writing as I start my weekday routine of eat, drive, work, drive, eat, sleep, with tiny pockets of writing snuck in random pockets of my day.
Not this morning. Okay, it helped that it's a weekend, but even so, I was up and eager, not for breakfast, but for my keyboard. I knew I wouldn't write the story today, but I had to capture the bones. Because I'm becoming another sort of dreamer, the kind that sees a dream she wants to achieve. Writing started as a hobby, a way to inject a little creativity into daily life. I dabbled, leaving it behind for months, even years, and then pulling up the old stuff and cringing.
Not so anymore. I can't write every day, but I want to. And during that commute, or other quiet times I eke out of my day, and okay, maybe even at a business meeting or while my spouse is talking about something, my brain composes stories in my head, creating people and places, adventures, heartache, love, all just waiting to flow, like mud or water, from my fingertips to the screen.
And when I read older work, I no longer cringe. I study weaknesses, and more often delight in the fact that it's better than I recalled. That I may possess a smidgen of skill and talent for this craft. I still don't have enough time to write. I still have a tendency to move to a new story when my plot bogs down, rather than pushing through to the end. And I've not learned enough about the business of sharing my writing, be it traditional or self-publishing. Not to mention I've not updated this blog in close to a year.
But I dreamed a story last night, strands of characters and events weaving together while I slept. And when I awoke, I continued to spin it out in my mind. I'll take that dream over the miscellaneous file any day.
