Dreaming of fiction

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers. I've read interviews with him and one of the things I find interesting is how much his writing philosophy differs from mine. Specifically how he looks at inspiration.

Someone asked him if he got inspiration from his dreams, and I was surprised that he said never. He claims that dreams are too fragmented, too anti-story to make a story out of.

I get what he's saying. I'll wake up from a dream and think: this would make the best story ever, and sometimes I'll write it down. Then I'll look at it later and think, huh? But even though it doesn't come in pre-packaged story format, dreams have provided me some of my best story ideas. And when I've already got a story going, I'll wake up in the middle of a particularly screwed up dream and suddenly have the missing element. What I wonder is if Gaiman is just reluctant to talk about dreams because inspiration is such a tricky subject.

Authors are always asked where they get their ideas. It's one of the most common questions because people think, if I could just get ideas like that, I could be there. But inspiration is hard for writers to talk about because I think mostly we don't KNOW where we get our ideas. They're just there and then we're turning them into stories. So authors make up bullshit answers or sidestep the question. I think I know the answer though, and it's that ideas come from freaking everywhere. The reason it's so hard to define the where is because there's no particular where, ideas are as common as air. The only difficult part of getting an idea is holding on to it. I think most people don't recognize good ideas. Or bad ideas for that matter. Any time you think "what if this..." that's an idea, but most people let the thought go before it can develop. I think that's where ideas come from. It's not the ideas that's difficult, it's the execution.

*Image linked to IMDB.

In Your Dreams

Can you read in your dreams? Supposedly no one can. I think it's got something to do with the part of the brain which is active when you're asleep. The language centers are not awake, therefore you can't read.I think I first became aware of this question when I was a kid and saw a Batman (cartoon) episode where Batman realized he was dreaming when he picked up a book and it was full of gibberish letters: no words. It made me wonder because I often read in dreams, especially in that half-sleep state where you're about to wake up. I'll be reading a wonderful story, but then I wake up and can usually no longer remember it.

Of course this isn't quite the same as real reading, what I'm dreaming about is the action of reading, the ingestion of a perfect story. This has nothing to do with language. Sometimes I did remember what I'd read, but if I tried to picture the words on paper I'd be unable to do so.

Since that time I've been curious about reading in dreams, and whenever I dream of reading I try to remember the appearance of the words. I've succeeded at least once, remembering the image of at least parts of words. In my dream I was chatting with my brother on AIM and the word fragments I definitely remembered reading were: heronma (part of my brother's old screen name), sweater, and Ameri (part of American). There might have been more, but those are the ones I can remember now.

When you are reading but not reading in dreams, usually you see nothing but scrambled letters. My theory is that human beings have the image of letters memorized in their brains, but for words we put them together in different arrangements. One is visual memory, one is language memory (probably not a scientific term). It can be assumed that in dreams visual memory is active, but language memory is not. So maybe when I saw segments and even a few full words, it was because my brain had put those entire words into visual memory the same way it does with letters.

I've noticed in dreams that sometimes I think I've read something definite, and then when I go back to check, the letters have shifted and it says something else entirely, or nothing at all. When I notice, inevitably I wake up.