Writing Exercises

I attend a weekly writing group. I thought it was a great coincidence one week when I arrived for class and the prompt on the blackboard was, "What did you dream last night?" I wrote most of "Go North For Freedom" that day.

There were other prompts too: first was to write a dream dictionary for five words yelled out randomly by class members. Here's what I came up with:

Dirty Dishes - if you dream of dirty dishes in your home, you are stressed and overextended. If you dream of dirty dishes at someone else's home, that person is not trustworthy. If you dream of cleaning or clean dishes, you are prepared for new opportunities. If you dream of broken dishes, you are about to lose money.

Newspaper - if you dream of carrying a newspaper, it denotes that you can trust your associates. If you dream of reading a newspaper, you should consider going back to school.

Statue - if you dream of a large statue, you are about to encounter a powerful person. If you dream of a small statue or figurine, it refers to someone in your circle of friends and family. If the figurine is an animal, it denotes a child; if a goddess, your wife or mother; if a god or bust of a revered man, your husband or father. If the statue is broken, your relationship with that person will undergo changes.

Fish - if you dream of fishing, you are seeking answers in life. If you are eating fish, you are growing into the wisdom of age and experience. If the fish is threatening, such as a shark or piranha, you are learning to protect yourself spiritually and mentally. If the fish are in a tank, you are risk-averse.

Monkey - if you dream of a circus monkey, you are feeling unchallenged and perhaps humiliated at your job. If you dream of a monkey in the wild, you are being given an opportunity to be true to your nature.

Next, the class leader put a list of book titles on the board, all with the word "dream" in the title. The exercise was to write something about what I supposed the books were about. And for the most part, the titles were general and nondescript enough for the exercise to work.

I Still Dream About You features Fabio with black hair, clutching a swooning beauty in a torn dress, drowning in a sea of lace and blonde.

The Mind At Night is a work of nonfiction where three theses are discussed for 600 pages, the fascination of each wearing away steadily, the footnotes a rockslide of shale on a sandy seabed.

The Dream Doctor is a novelization of a British SF show wherein a dashing man in a bowtie rescues a plucky but bewildered English girl from a villain with the face of a pig.

Fever Dream is an earnest, dramatic novel following a married couple through the dissolution of their relationship. There's a picture of a tree on the cover. I suppose someone might read it...

The Lake of Dreams is a novel for young people, where brothers fight and a girl has an awkward time with a bathing suit.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is too famous. Everyone loves it and there are a bunch of internet memes based on it. LOL.

This morning I dreamed that I was on a river cruise from Central Africa to Scandinavia. My sisters and I swam in the river and watched the water change as we went north - crocodiles and water snakes giving way to trout and kingfishers. I remember trying to recall the names of the countries we passed through on the map, but couldn't; can anyone remember that kind of symbolic detail while dreaming?



Today a twofer. Driving past the PNE yesterday I suddenly remembered a dream I'd had a few days ago, where in they had built a fancy new big ol metal roller coaster at the park. Not only was this roller coaster big and awesome, it had an amazing feature: the train was designed to detach itself from the track for part of the route like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon - connected to the track at the front only, and the rest of the length whipping around in the air as it sped along.

Dontcha hate that, when you dream of something cool, and only become aware later that it doesn't exist in the real world? Happens to me all the time.

A picture of what frightens you

I am with a group of people at a workshop or something, and the facilitator asks everyone to draw a picture of what frightens us. I leave my page blank for a while while I think it over. The woman next to me draws a shark, which is usually the symbol I fall back on to show primal fear, and I think to myself, great, now I have to think up something new, because I can't draw exactly what she has drawn!

The effort of delving for a new image starts to really get to me, & I start whining, then crying, then tearing my hair out because I can't think of anything that epitomizes "fear"; I try thinking of different ways to draw sharks, but not only does that not seem creative enough, but I also literally scare myself with the images that come into my head. Pretty soon I am reduced to a two-year-old style temper tantrum, rolling on the floor while people say "Oh for fuck's sake, woman!" and the ones who were comforting me at first withdraw and leave me to straighten myself out.

In the back of my mind, I know I am pushing myself to a place where my instincts will suggest a symbol I can use that will have real meaning, even if my conscious mind doesn't yet recognize it. Finally I go one degree of separation away from the shark itself, and I draw the marine biologist; a man standing beside a Jeep on a beach under a cloudy sky. The man is no-one I know, but at least I get to finish the project in a way that feels true to me. Several people complement me on my drawing.

The first dream I can remember

The first dream I can remember in my life was of lying on the bottom of the ocean in the mud while grasses and seaweed swayed all over me. Some nights I would find myself sinking down into the mud and freaking out when it started to leak into my mouth. Other nights my baby mind would make up strange creatures like the elusive "grass shark" to menace my sleeping self. It was scary, but only because I didn't know what was happening to me. Then, as I learned to talk and ask questions, I found out more about things that live in the ocean, and these things came into my dreams. Over time I spent more time swimming around rather than just lying on the bottom, and I encountered fish, whales, even other people, deep under the waves. One day my mom brought home a big fat novel with a picture of a submarine on the cover, and from that day on, submarines became a part of my dreams too.