Sometimes my dreams scare me. Sometimes they make me laugh. Literally. The whole scene from the movie The Waterboy, in which a university professor asks the class why alligators are aggressive and in which Adam Sandler stands up and scientifically explains “Because alligators have all teeth and they don’t have a toothbrush. of teeth, “he repeated in a dream and apparently made me laugh out loud in my dream. Sometimes my dreams just tell me that I need a major vacation from reality, like when I dream that I’m going through the always fascinating prescription information for a drug, that insert with the really little type that contains all the possible side effects and warnings. for the drug, which, if you really read it, can drive you completely insane.

My mother, my aunt and I always have really strange dreams when there is a full moon. What is the scientific explanation for this? I’m sure I don’t know. My mom once dreamed that she was covered in baked potatoes. He also dreamed that he was a basketball star and kept running around the court and wetting the ball (he’s five foot three inches tall, by the way, and wakes up sweating). Most of my weirdest dreams have to do with food. One time I was floating in life-size ice cream with peanut butter sauce. On another occasion, he was skating inside a huge pinball machine and there were bars on the bumpers. I’m pretty sure I was on a diet when I had those dreams. Why can’t I have normal dreams about Pierce Brosnan or… wait, I once dreamed of Pierce Brosnan and can’t get into the sordid details here?

Sometimes it helps to disassemble a dream and interpret it. Sometimes, frankly, the performance sucks; a dream is just a dream. But let’s try one of mine. The giant ice cream. Dreaming of ice cream obviously denotes pleasure and satisfaction with your life, good luck and success in love. I have yet to find a dream book that has entries for peanut butter sauce. I dreamed that there were tornadoes swirling around me the other night; this supposedly suggests that I am experiencing extreme emotional outbursts and tantrums (wait, that’s just my daily workday!). I also dreamed that I got kicked out of American Idol (at least I was in the final round), and again, I laughed in my sleep. On a more serious note, several days before 911, my mom and they both had strange dreams; I dreamed that I was among many people running out of a very tall building in New York City and she dreamed that a submarine was hitting the ocean floor so hard that a building was collapsing. That was, frankly, weird.

My point, and I have one, is that dreams can be good fodder for a writer. I read somewhere that we all daydream an average of 70 to 120 minutes a day. Obviously, there are some who take time wasting to another level, daydreaming 18 hours a day. That’s a lot of time wasted unless you put it to good use, say, like in your novel. I highly recommend activities like sleeping and daydreaming that allow your mind to wander and lower your level of consciousness to the point where you lose yourself in your imagined story (not, of course, when you are operating heavy machinery or driving on multiple lanes). road or having brain surgery). For my first fictional thriller, Dead On, I was thinking so much about my characters that I actually started dreaming about them. Chapter 21 of Dead On is actually the result of a dream I had, which I think may in part be an inherited memory or traumatic past life that I lived prior to recorded and often textbook-skewed history. . I used most of the dream from the book and added a little bit to it, because of course Dead On is fiction.

Dreams can heal, entertain, inform and stimulate. Some dreams are quite common, like being caught naked in a public place or being back in high school where you can’t remember the damn combination from your locker. In the case of the writer, dreams can help you plot and explore while your grumpy, fussy, self-destructive critic is depressed. Dreaming can help you be the writer you always imagined yourself to be, it can connect us with the human race and our art. However, the benefit of topping with baked potatoes is still being studied.

www.DeadOnNovel.com [http://www.DeadOnNovel.com]