I'm talking real dreams here, the ones that occur in REM sleep.
Early Monday morning, as I'm fumbling for alarms in the middle of them, my mind sinking back into the story line once again and yet becoming alert, I felt fragments of familiarity...
First, here is the dream:
I'm reading a story a literature textbook about a teen girl with severe health problems that does amazing things, academically and personally, as she cares for rescue horses. One of my former editors sends me to get a story, and I feel the girl is interesting enough to ask a former staffer (who was also a videographer) to shoot a video, too.
During the course of the dream, the girl's house turns out to be the one we lost in Channahon. The horses are neglected, left starving in the rain, and I feel sorry for them and let them inside. The mother has greatly exaggerated this girl's accomplishments, and the family is full of issues, especially the mother. The girl's younger sister, somewhere between nine and twelve, has a severe heart issue; the father works, lives with them, but comes and goes as he pleases.
Fast forward. We are walking into a hospital reception area. The woman at the desk is handing out free fruit: bananas, apples, oranges. She gives a banana to the girl's younger sister, who tries to get one for the teen girl and this particular girl's babysitter. She's given an apple and an orange. The little girl tries giving either the banana (which is long past its ripeness) or the orange back to the woman because neither she nor the babysitter can have potassium, due to their heart conditions, but the woman is distracted waiting on other patients. Finally, and a bit irritably, the receptionist trades out the fruit.
Walking into the main part of the hospital, I find an expanse much like a shopping mall. We need to go to the lower level, which is all white and maze-like. The girls all of a sudden have brothers, and the entire group splits up with imaginary guns into a game that seems to be customary for them, but I don't know the rules. But the idea seems to be a variation on cops and robbers, one they play when they get into weird unfamiliar areas like this one.
I don't feel like it's a good idea to split up and say so, but they're hidden, and I'm trying to navigate this maze, alone, with a bad sense I'm going to run into someone not good, and I do, some guy with a real gun. At this point, I'm aware that I'm dreaming, so I turn him into the good guy who will lead me out of the maze and back into the mall-type area, while I'm all the while explaining my real lack of interior compass.
Flash forward: it's twilight, and we're in a road that cuts through a cornfield. The mother is trying to buckle the younger daughter (who now seems to be about five) into her car seat while trying to feed her kiblets of food, which isn't agreeing with her. The doctor (a middle age man in a white coat) appears, explaining why these kiblets aren't good for her. By now, my alarm has started interjecting into the dream, so it gets a bit muddled.
But the dreams weave back and forth from the cornfield, my Channahon kitchen where the mother is trying to figure out dinner from a freezer of frosted-over food, uncertain if the father will be home tonight (since they live in a Crest Hill duplex), which dips into awareness of the reality of some of these characters, until I'm finally awake.
After feeding the cats and grabbing coffee, I decided to write this down before I forgot it. Here is what my brain mashed together:
Literature book: I homeschooled my six kids, so we read literature excerpts nearly every day.
Story/former editor: I was returning to work the next day and had snapped a picture earlier that day of the type of item she collects.
Video: One of our reporters had shot video footage for me of a new feature we're trying to launch, and I spent time with his Sunday afternoon reviewing some of the editing. But a former editor had once shot a video to accompany a feature story I wrote, and it was he who appeared in the dream.
Emaciated horses: Not a clue.
Channahon home: The location for most of my features writing for many years
The fruit: Some of us take medicine that interacts with certain foods.
The hospital/mall: One of my sons is going through some health concerns; I have some tests this week (and more to schedule), and I went to the mall on vacation (only for Panera coffee, but we parked not near the entrance and had to walk through it).
Getting lost: I really do have no sense of direction and am easily lost.
Cops and robbers: My six kids literally played meme wars for several days on a group message so I could see them all.
The doctor in the white lab coat: Was actually a Joliet Junior College chef and subject in one of the videos I reviewed on Sunday afternoon.
The girl's sister with the heart condition: She actually had a name (Margie) and (in real life) was the younger sister of a high school friend. Don't think she had a heart condition. But my friend had popped into my mind a couple days ago in a fleeting way, although I had not thought of her in years (ditto for her sister).
And these are the components that my brain assembled in the final REM cycle before awakening. What that has to do with creativity ought to be obvious, but I feel that if my brain can assemble something like this from random stuff stores in my brain while I'm sleeping, it should be able to do this and more while I'm awake.
I think it also speaks to letting the mind take breaks from one creative work by working on another, kind of what I did last week on vacation, where I rested from features and worked on fiction (which I'd neglected for many weeks due to work demands, kind of like the neglected horses, perhaps?).
Although one rests while sleeping, the brain is active elsewhere. So maybe resting from one creative work while hammering out another sparks creative life in the one temporarily set aside.
Something to ponder, don't you think?
