Having always been married to the mystical, documenting my dreams is like breathing: it comes naturally. If you trawled through my belongings, you’d find a myriad of papers with dreams written down and dated. One such notebook I picked up from Greenwich Village on a weekend break.
Whether they were recurring or precognitive, every one was important in some way. They allow me to figure out my waking life via the messages I receive through my nocturnal visions. Salman Rushdie recently spoke of a dream he had days before he was stabbed. In said dream, he was in an amphitheatre and was being attacked by a gladiator with a knife. He was so shook about this that he almost didn’t attend the event he was almost killed at.
My recent reading has been made up of Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Insomniac Dreams’ and J. W. Dunne’s ’An Experiment With Time’. Both books deal with the documenting of dreams and their ability to predict the future. Such precognition I have always nurtured in myself. J. W. Dunne wrote:
“Almost everybody has, at one time or another, amused himself by retracing the train of ideas which has led him, without any conscious aim on his part, to think of, or remember, a certain thing.”
David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ is said to deal with dreams: the familiarity of a preconceived knowledge that comes alive at night. The man in the diner speaks of his recurring dreams with a profound sense of knowing. Many think people like us are crazy or delusional, but certain things cannot be understood until you experience them for yourself.
All of my recurring dreams have distinct qualities. There are aliens, fortune tellers, and doors that lead to unknown worlds. I believe we are far more connected to higher worlds than we realise. Somewhere out there may be a version of me where I didn’t become a writer, a version of me who doesn’t enjoy the macabre. Our dreams are vehicles for psychic memories.
I have been absolutely haunted by some dreams. One I had a year or so ago didn’t leave me for at least a week. Others have been so vivid that I have immediately gone to where they took place upon waking. Many have involved visitations. I dream of Stewart a lot, usually in the form of a phone. I send a message to him and he replies, thus indicating he isn’t actually dead. Though my most recent visitation saw him in physical form. I leaned across him, clinging to him with such desperation. All the senses are utilised when I dream. I have felt pain, smelled things strongly, heard sounds, tasted food, and touched various things.
Our dreams inspire great works of art, detailed as such in this article. If I was actually good at drawing, I would illustrate every single dream. Sylvia Plath (my eternal spirit) also had vivid dreams:
“Very bad dreams lately. One just after my period last week of losing my month-old baby: a transparent meaning. The baby formed just like a baby, only small as a hand, died in my stomach and fell forward: I looked down at my bare belly and saw the round bump of its head in my right side, bulging out like a burst appendix. It was delivered with little pain, dead. Then I saw two babies, a big nine-month one, and a little one-month one with a blind white-piggish face nuzzling against it; a transfer image, no doubt, from Rosalind’s cat and kittens a few days before: the little baby was a funny shape, like a kitten with white skin instead of fur. But my baby was dead. I think a baby would make me forget myself in a good way. Yet I must find myself.”
This is present in Plath’s poetry. Her and Hughes were great believers in the psychic nature of dreaming. However, they weren’t the only writers influenced by their dreams, for Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His play, The Unicorn from the Stars, is a dark, allegorical fairytale.
Documenting your dreams can be done anywhere: a notebook, scraps of paper, the notes app, notion, etc. When you document, take note of specific elements that may be recurring. Think of it as a puzzle you’re mighty eager to solve. There are online resources for decoding dreams, otherwise known as “dream dictionaries”. Personally, I go between mediums, depending on what I have to hand.
In my twenty-seven years of living, I have had lots of dreams; many of which I still remember. In them I have been abducted by aliens, had my fortune told, found a door to a new world, been naked, had people die, been attacked by lions, been attacked by bears, met my idols, found out information that came true, met the dead, and even more crazy, off-the-wall stuff. Ten years ago, I kept dreaming of this particular person who wasn’t in my life anymore. I wrote it all down, pondered it, and decided I needed to see this person one more time. I found a way and we had our last meeting. The dreams stopped after that, though X has appeared in my dreams very recently.
Mark Twain had a dream about his brother dying and being buried in a metal coffin; a fact that was unusual as wooden coffins were the common standard. As well as the coffin, there were white roses surrounding a singular red rose. Not long after, Twain’s brother would soon die. As he walked into the room, he saw the exact same metal coffin, but the roses were missing. Just as Twain passed it off as sheer coincidence, a woman appeared with a large bouquet of white roses surrounding a solitary red rose. Spooky right?
Sigmund Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ is one of the most famous books on the matter. He said:
“Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet.”
The realm of dreams, often associated with fairies and occultism, is something to take note of. They are a chance to reflect on yourself and your actions. They serve as great inspiration in your creative life. To dream is to see beyond, beyond, and beyond.
Courtenay's Corner 