The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams (31 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams
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workthere is also a great deal of fun involved. And if a dream symbol leaves you feeling really good, why not incorporate it somehow into your waking life? Bake a dream cake! Design a dream T-shirt! Whatever you do, thank your dream for giving you this gift. You may find that the result is a richer, more rewarding dream life, with better recall and that much more to work and play with each morning of your waking life. Chapter 7 offers more ways to "sleep on it," presenting techniques for enhancing your creativity through dreamwork.
 
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Chapter Seven
Sleeping on it Using Dreams to Enhance Your Creativity, Productivity, Healing, and Spirituality
What do golf champion Jack Nicklaus, best-selling author Anne Rice, and scientific genius Albert Einstein have in common? What about nineteenth-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pop entertainer Steve Allen, and surrealist painter Salvador Dali? Despite diverse interests and areas of expertise, all of these notable achievers share an interesting point of inspiration: dreams.
Creativity is the source of great works of literature, music, and art. But it is also the driving force behind such things as decision making, scientific innovation, and entrepreneurship. All of us are creative. How do we know for sure? Because all of us dream. Dream thought is similar to creative thought: Unlike logical deduction, dream thought uses a single image as a jumping-off point, following not where logic might guide, but whatever cross-references the dreamer makes, building image upon image until the scenario is complete. The dreaming mind is free of
 
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inhibition, free of the fear of judgment. You might think of dreaming as brainstorming: Through free association, word play, symbolism, and perhaps some random image making, the dreaming mind exercises the creative skills even as the waking mind sleeps.
Most creative thinkers agree that letting an idea gel is an important part of the creative process. You are probably familiar with this stage of creativity. You have considered all the angles, gathered information, explored possibilities. Now, you're ready just to sit with the problem for a while and let it incubate. Then, when you least expect it, a new idea emerges fully formed. If you're like many people, you might "sleep on it," waking up in the morning with a fresh perspective and a clear new direction.
Usually, this type of problem solving occurs randomlya person goes to bed, dreams about a problem, and then wakes up knowing just what to do. But there are also techniques for dream incubationthe act of asking your dreaming mind to come up with an idea or solve a problem while you are sleeping. In chapter 6, we look at some of the ways that creating art can enhance your understanding of dreams. In this chapter, we explore the other side of the equation: how dreams, whether random or induced, can enhance your artistic creations.
"I Can Never Decide Whether My Dreams Are The Result Of My Thoughts Or My Thoughts Are The Result Of My Dreams."
D. H. Lawrence, English writer
A good place to begin learning about dreams and creativity is a survey of the dreams of some creative people. Keep in mind that you need not be an artist, scientist, or scholar to derive great benefit from creative dreaming. Asking your dreams to assist you can help you design an addition to your house, improve your jump shot, landscape your garden, allocate human resources at your
 
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company, plan a family vacation, or improve relationships with your friends and family.
Dream-Inspired Literature
The earliest Greek plays are said to have come from dream stories. And many of the great works of Western literature had their impetus in dreams. Theodor Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, James Joyce, and many other classic authors turned to their dreamworlds for creative energy. Even today, contemporary authors look to their dreamworlds for characters, stories, and even a solution to the dreaded writer's block. In Naomi Epel's book
Writers Dreaming
, Anne Rivers Siddons, the popular author of such novels as
Peachtree Road, Outer Banks
, and
Colony
, comments: "I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from."
The nineteenth-century English poet William Blake is known as much for his elaborate illustrations as for his verse. Not only were his literary and artistic creations said to have come from dreams and what he called "visions," but he also devised a new and more cost-effective means of printing his works after having a dream that led him to switch to copper printing plates. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his evocative poem
Kubla Khan
based on an exceptionally vivid dream in which he claims to have "heard" all of the two hundred-plus lines. The poem's unusual imagery is distinctly dreamlike: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.'' Like modern dreamworkers, Coleridge is said to have scribbled down everything he could remember immediately upon waking; unfortunately, so the story goes, his maid knocked
 
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on the door, interrupting his train of thought and causing him to lose the last verse. Robert Louis Stevenson relied on the "little people" or "brownies" he said were responsible for giving him the stories that took place in his dreams, turning to them deliberately in search of inspiration for his fiction.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was one such gift. And Mary Shelley was a young woman of only twenty years when she wrote
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
, a book whose main character, a laboratory experiment that becomes a man-made monster, first appeared to her in a dream.
I Should Have Lost Many A Good Hit, Had I Not Set Down At Once Things That Occurred To Me In My Dreams."
Sir Walter Scott, Scottish author
In the United States, Edgar Allen Poe's eerie stories are known for their otherworldly surrealism. His short story "The Lady Ligeia" is one of several that were inspired by an image first seen in a dream, in this case her haunting eyes. More recently, Anne Rice, author of the acclaimed series of vampire novels beginning with
The Queen of the Damned
and including
Interview with the Vampire
, which became a feature film in 1994, pulls dream images into her waking life in order to create the hauntingly memorable characters that populate her novels. And Amy Tan, the Chinese-American author of
The Joy Luck Club
and
The Kitchen God's Wife
, has relied on dreams for personal guidance as well as literary inspiration. She takes creative dreaming one step further, by actively seeking solutions to her writing quandaries. In
Writers Dreaming
, she remarks, "Sometimes, if I'm stuck on the ending of a story, I'll just take the story with me to bed. I'll let it become part of a dream and see if something surfaces. . . . I don't normally see
 
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my characters in dreams exactly as they appear in a book, but I do experience a similar kind of feeling or emotion, something that gives me new insight into the questions that I'm asking of those characters."
Dream-Inspired Art
The surrealists of the early twentieth century are probably most closely associated with dream imagery in painting. Anyone who has seen a painting such as Salvadore Dali's
Persistence of Memory
no doubt recalls the impossible, yet realistic, quality of the melting clocks that dot the canvas. "Am I dreaming?"the question lucid dreamers often ask themselvesseems especially appropriate when confronting a surrealist work: Surrealists rely on images that appear realistic, drawn or painted in perspective, with appropriate color and shading. But the scenarios depicted are bizarre and fanciful, much like the content of a dream. In fact, the surrealists took Sigmund Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams
as a kind of call to action, and made it their mission to use his technique of free association to create a genre of psychoanalytic painting intended to tap the unconscious. Dali himself acknowledged the large debt he owed to his dreams, calling his paintings "hand-painted dream photographs." Other types of artists, too, have relied on dreams to provide imagery and insights, symbols and solutions, using such techniques as lucid dreaming and dream incubation.
"If The Dream Is A Translation Of Waking Life, Waking Life Is Also A Translation Of The Dream."
René Magritte, Belgian surrealist painter

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