To sleep, Perchance to dream

well, 10:45 is still morning, but it sure seems like a totally different day than 3am.

I woke early today. I had some problems sleeping. Pizza at 10pm isn't good for old people, remember that for when / if you grow up. One problem with being a writer and eating funky foods late at night is the dreams.

Now I'm not saying that all dreams are bad. You'd think as an erotic writer I'd have lots of hot sexy dreams, wake up ready, and attack my spouse. Nope, sorry. Doesn't happen. Besides, if I woke up You Know Who from a sound sleep on a worknight; well, lets just say the house better be on fire. Almost 20 years of marriage, and lots of job stresses make a really good night sleep very important.

But no, as a writer, my dreams are usually, sadly enough, about the book I'm reading at the time. That can be nice, but it can be particularly depressing. My dreams when I read the Thomas Covanant Series By Stephen R. Donaldson weren't just depressing, they were near suicide inducing.

Laural K. Hamilton set up some nice action packed dreams. Her Kick butt character Anita Blake had just the right amount of attitude and gunplay to make for some real REM actionfests. Some of her early books really brought me hours of alternative dream scenarios. None of them worked out like the books did, but hay, that just means I got two stories for the price of one.

Michael Resnick had some pretty neat dream stories too. I loved "Santiago", but I didn't dream about it until I finished the book! It was pretty cool; I continued the story from where he left off. Of course mine had a much happier ending...

The same thing happened after Harry Turtledove's Adventure of the Toxic Spell Dump. I had such vivid and wonderful dreams for that one, I even wrote him and asked if I could write a sequel using his characters / world. He said no.

I wasn't surprised. All writers are protective of their work. Most of them even sue to keep you from writing things based on their characters. (Except Gene Roddenberry: he loved fan fiction, as long as you didn't sell it you were fine...).

But Harry Turtledove said something in his reply that I took to heart. He told me to make my own version of that fantasy world and write the story from there. I thought about it for a couple days. Alright, I brooded and sulked... But finally, I did what he said. I wrote it down. The story I wrote became "Fleeing the Night." It's a story about a working class stiff in a world where physics to them is what mystical knowledge is to us; legendary, but not really blatantly effective. In this story, his world gets rocked by the discovery of a complex machine and a government conspiracy to keep magic in power over physics.

Since then, several of my stories have heavy dream influences. In "Coming Home," the entire first two chapters are adapted from a dream. Especially the wonderful 'mystical grove' on the path near Dani's house. At least half of "Green Haired Beauty" is from dreams. "We had such hopes for you Jack" is 100% from the land of REM.

Pretty much all of my books have parts that came to me in dreams. None of the words ended up exactly like the original dream, but the sleeper is a definite part of my process.

So, I guess that means' "To sleep perchance to dream..." is only part of it. For me you have to ad: "To Dream perhaps to write... To write perhaps to create..."

What a novel idea! (Sorry, I had to get a bad pun in there, it was getting way too philosophical.)