“We can only begin to dream once we have truly awakened from our sleep.” – The Dreamer’s Lotus

 

My first novel is awakening – In less than two months, The Dreamer’s Lotus will be in physical form.

To say it’s an exciting feeling would be a huge understatement. 

Writers are often asked, how did you come up with your idea? Everyone has their own inspiration, be it travel, nature, society – but for me, the concept for this book came through a dream. Five years ago I woke up with a single phrase lingering on my mind like a smoky blue electricity – “At the top of the hill stood a tall tree where the boy with grandfather eyes would go and overlook the village.” I scrambled for paper, and in the dim darkness I scratched out the words, that gratefully, I was able to understand the next morning.

There is so much I want to talk about and share – but for now, I’ll focus on dreams, for after all, they are a key theme in The Dreamer’s Lotus. Mainly, I want to discuss:

 

How can we use dreams to improve our writing and what we are hoping to manifest.

Remembering our dreams is obviously the must crucial component. Our conscious mind is a powerful ally, and when united with the unconscious, amazing things can happen. My most effective way of remembering my dreams (and yeah, it’s gonna seem ridiculously simple) is saying to myself, moments before I feel myself falling asleep, “I am going to remember my dreams.” I repeat that half a dozen times, and more often than not, I wake up with a fairly good recall of my nighttime adventures. The more I repeat this exercise, the more trained my brain becomes for remembering my dreams. There are of course a multitude of tricks that people use, which I encourage people to share below. For me, the simpler it is, the better it seems to work.

We usually have three sets of dreams which correspond to our REM sleep. Sometimes we wake up immediately after a dream and then fall back asleep, which leads into part two.

The second component for most people is the hardest part – a dream journal. We dream every night, but by morning, and within the first fifteen minutes of being awake, we’ve forgotten 90% of our dreams. The dream journal helps mitigate that loss. I’ll admit, the last thing I usually want to do at 3:00 A.M. is start writing. But the easier I make it for myself, the more often it gets accomplished, and the more dreams I remember. I keep my journal and pen within arms reach, and have the pen placed between two fresh sheets of paper. Most of the time I don’t even open my eyes – I just write down as many words as I can to spark my memory in the morning – the more descriptive the better.

And finally, and I think this may be the most important part, is paying attention to our waking world in the present moment. The more conscious we are of our day-to-day surroundings, the more conscious we become of the dream. When we sit down to write, identify the corresponding details that our focus has landed upon in the two worlds. This can help to pull out the ideas and themes that have been trying to percolate through our awareness.

Not all of our dreams are going to become best selling books, but the process of writing them down, of alchemizing the ethereal into the tangible, we become more adept at our craft, and ultimately, more in tune with our own creations.