a source of their creativity.
In Kelly Sullivan Walden’s book, I Had the Strangest Dream, the author offers tips on remembering your dreams.
1.Sleep with a notebook by your bed—if/when you wake up with a dream, jot down snippets if that’s all you have.
2.Incubate a dream: Ask for a dream before you go to sleep.
3.Once the dream is recorded, spend time with it. Look up the images in a dream book and think about the symbols.
Here’s a dream from one of Kelly’s books:
A woman is in a bar and another woman approaches her with a drink. As the woman gets close to her, she throws the drink in her face, hits her over the head with a glass, and yells in her face, “Wake up.” And the woman wakes up from her dream and she’s covered in water and she’s got a bump on her head and she’s holding a glass. And she realizes that she did this to herself. She poured water on herself, hit herself on the head and was yelling the words “wake up.”
And she sat on the edge of her bed drenched and aching and saying, “What am I supposed to be waking up to?”
She sat down to write. She started journaling and she realized she was journaling for the first time in years. What came through her journaling was, “You’re a creative. You have a master’s in creative writing and you teach creative writing in schools. You are constantly encouraging your students to write, and yet you have not written creatively in years. You must write.”
So, she continued her journaling and it turned into pages and pages and pages of a story, of a fictional story that turned into poetry. Cut to present time. She’s changed her life. She’s no longer teaching, she’s writing full-time and making a living at it. And she’s living in Mexico and traveling. She’s got a totally different life—unrecognizable from the life that she had at that time.
And some of the background of what was happening at that time in her life was that she had put all of the money that she had made and saved into this “dream house” that was completely falling apart and causing so much stress. And she ends this story by saying, “Instead of plunking all my money down into my dream house, I thought I would just put my money and energy into living my dreams instead.”
Recently, my friend Yvonne had a dream about numbers. She tried to remember them in the dream but she couldn’t. When she woke up she realized that the numbers were her old address and that she needed to write about a friend who had co-owned the house with her and had died of AIDS.
The story of how I wrote “The Ferlinghetti School of Poetics” is not so unusual, but it did require me to pay attention, to record my dreams and to meditate on them. The poem went on to win an award from the City of San Francisco, and was made into a short film that has been shown around the world.
In the first dream, Lawrence Ferlinghetti made an appearance. That was it. I woke up and said, “Hey, that’s cool, I had a dream about a famous poet.”
The second dream came some time later—maybe two or three months. In the dream, I am on a dark street instructing a small boy: “You gotta go to the Ferlinghetti School. It’s totally rad and completely cool.” I’m beginning to think something interesting is happening. Recurring dreams always deserve attention!
In the third dream, Ferlinghetti arrives in a movie theater. By this time, I was thinking “I don’t know what it is with Ferlinghetti, but I’m getting a pretty strong message.”
But what should I do with it?
I began to craft a poem. I didn’t know I had a winner until the poem was published six subsequent times, three times by request.
Sometime after the poem was out and published, I was co-hosting a program on how artists use their dreams with dream expert Kelly Sullivan Walden. I read the Ferlinghetti poem on air. Kelly’s husband, musician and filmmaker Dana Walden, fell in love with the poem and asked if I was interested in making a movie of the poem.
Over the next six months we filmed in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. We spent another few months editing. A year later, we launched the film at the Beat Museum in San Francisco to great reviews.
That little five-minute film went on to be shown at the International Poetry Festival in Athens, Greece, the Meraki Film Festival in Madrid, and numerous venues in San Francisco. The poem won Best Poem of the year from Levure Littéraire, a French literary journal, and the film went viral too, garnering over 12,000 hits on YouTube.
That seemingly innocuous practice of recording my dreams delivered me an award-winning poem and helped me on my way to becoming a winning writer.
I believe that using dreams for art is especially powerful because dreams are “messages” or information from our unconscious, the part of our brains that is most sensitive. The unconscious knows us better than we know ourselves and can tell us what we really feel, even when we are thinking differently.
This is Carl Jung on dreams:
The dream is often occupied with apparently very silly details, thus producing an impression of absurdity, or else it is on the surface so unintelligible as to leave us thoroughly bewildered.
Hence, we always have to overcome a certain resistance before we can seriously set about disentangling the intricate web through patient work.
But when at last we penetrate to its real meaning, we find ourselves deep in the dreamer’s secrets and discover with astonishment that an apparently quite senseless dream is in the highest degree significant, and that in reality it speaks only of important and serious matters.
This discovery compels rather more respect for the so-called superstition that dreams have a meaning, to which the rationalistic temper of our age has hitherto given short shrift.
So, go ahead! Capture that gem of an idea and see what evolves.
Writing Workshops, Writing Circles, & Write-a-thons
Even after settling into your writing style (daily practice or flow), you might still be wondering—How do I get those 10,000 hours/240 pages/poetry manuscript? Maybe you have tried a daily writing practice, but your words are not adding up. Your kids or full-time job disrupts your best intentions. Sickness, travel, family problems. The list of obstacles that can, and do, derail writers writing practices is long. They are part of life.
Okay. You tried. You failed. The self-flagellation begins.
I can’t stick to anything. I’ll never be a winning writer. I’m a loser. A failure. Why did I ever think that I could be a writer anyway? Who am I fooling?
These castigations are normal, and unfortunately seem to be part and parcel of the writer’s journey. But don’t give up hope—not yet!
Here is another idea.
Structured writing environments have set many on the path to winning writers.
In cities, workshops abound. Groups and classes can be found in local community colleges, adult learning centers, private teachers, and writing centers.
Workshop formats vary. One might be a group of writers who meet every week, or every two weeks or once a month. Some workshops employ a formal leader, a professional writing
