Sweet dreams

Mastering the art of writing in your sleep

Apparently there are people who do not dream.  Dream in the actual, physical, sense, that is.  As in when your eyes are closed and your body has shut down, but the brain keeps chugging away.  Not in the aspirational sense of having a dream and then chasing that dream.  Although who knows, maybe the two are connected.  Maybe someone needs to do a study on a possible link between not dreaming and not having a dream.  Someone probably has.

My sleep pattern is terrible at the moment.  Inevitably, usually in the classic 3.33am-ish sense, I will find myself wide awake and stressing about stuff.  If I get out of bed, to make better use of the dead of night than lying in my bed stressing about stuff, I will instantly feel very sleepy.  So I will go back to my bed, where I am suddenly wide awake and stressing again.  It is a cruel Catch-22 situation that only resolves itself when I realise it is now light out, so I must have gone back to sleep, but it really doesn’t feel like it.

The other night I was chagrined to wake up in the middle of the night, and to realise that in my dream I had been stressing.  This encroachment of dreaming stress time into waking sleep time was deeply unacceptable.  Dreams are meant to be about going on improbable quests and overcoming overwhelming obstacles in deeply illogical ways.  Well, that’s what a lot of my dreams are about. Read into it what you will.  I regard it as an occupational hazard.

In the dream in question, however, I was stressing about getting the boat ready for summer.  Not only is this a deeply disappointing thing to be both dreaming and stressing about, it is also completely nonsensical, even by dream standards.  I do not have a boat. I do not desire a boat. I am not a boat person. If someone gave me a boat, even if it was a superyacht seized from a Russian oligarch, I would probably just sell it on Trade Me or the superyacht equivalent of Trade Me.

In that way that dreams are as much about feelings as they are about what nonsense actually happens in the dream, I knew in my very being that I had dreamt about boats because I had, that very day, watched the film Saltburn. 

I don’t know why I knew this because it makes no real sense as there are (spoiler alert) no boats that I can think of, in Saltburn.  In terms of things aquatic in Saltburn, there are ponds and bridges over creeks, but no actual boats, unless I missed them because I was distracted, trying to figure out whether the film is a love letter to the English upper class; a hate letter to the English middle-class; or just plain bonkers.  As divisive as the film apparently is, it was still quite a fun watch, however.

Not a boat in sight

So why, then, was I sure that my boat-related dream was, in itself, related to a film about some landlocked English toffs behaving badly?  I just was.  Because dreams are as much about feelings as they are about any narrative path.

I know this from experience because when I am deep in writing mode I often dream about what it is I am currently writing.  Having experienced this form of sleep/work overtime again and again and again, I eventually decided to train my dreams. If I could solve script problems in my sleep, that would be brilliant.  Maybe in my sleep I could access pathways to solving my story issues that were not available to me when I was awake and sitting at my keyboard.  What an exceedingly efficient use of my time that would be.

The thing was, every now and then, after going to sleep pondering my problematic problem, I would wake up thinking I had cracked it. In my dream my characters would be following the story path, right up to the bit where things were starting to fall apart.  Then they would bust on through the writer’s block, effortlessly solving my problem and charging onward towards their great dénouement.

So I would wake up, energised and happy, convinced the script problem was now a thing of the past, thanks to my brilliant sleep-mind technique.

And then I would start doing my dream forensics, going back through the dream to make sure I’d remember every genius plot point when I was sitting at my keyboard again.

And then things would inevitably fall apart.

Hang on, why are there suddenly penguins riding hoverboards turning up everywhere, in every scene?  They’re not part of the world of this story.

And my script is set in West Auckland now, not West Berlin during the Cold War.  WTF?

And why is Taika Waititi in my script, pretending to be Jesus who is pretending to be Taika Waititi?

Thus I have learnt the hard way that relying upon sleep thoughts to solve waking world problems does not work.  Unfortunately, dreams are tricky beasts, luring you down surreal detours, giving you glimmers of hope before waking reality crushes them.  Maybe if I was writing The Lobster 2, then crazy dream stuff would be the go, but for now I’m afraid doing good old-fashioned writing mahi, interspersed with good old-fashioned bursts of procrastination, is the only way forward for this writer.

This writer who will never ever own a boat.