Person on the Page

When she was dying, my grandmother gave me her dream books. The well-worn three volumes had been stacked on her bedside table for as long as I could remember. They consisted of alphabetical listings of dream subjects (airplanes, bananas, cats, death . . .), and their meanings. To dream that a cat jumps onto your lap, for instance, foretells a major life change. A dream of attending a funeral may mean that a new job is imminent.

My grandmother had twenty-six grandchildren. I asked her why she had chosen to give the books to me. I was neither the oldest nor the youngest, and I didn’t think I had distinguished myself from the others in any other way. My grandmother replied that she had been the seventh child born to her mother.  And, at least in our backwoods Western Maryland parlance, the seventh child is gifted with special insights, one of which is an ability to interpret dreams.  She had used the books, she said, to confirm her intuitions about the meanings of the dreams about which people had asked her. Another of her insights, she said, was the ability to detect what she called “sensitivity” (her word for psychic aptitude) in others.  From among her grandchildren, she had identified me as a “sensitive.”

I kept the books and referred to them on occasions when I remembered my dreams. The psychic proclivities my grandmother detected in me must have withered on the vine because I’m confident I have none now, but my interest in dreams and their interpretations has remained with me.  It peaked when I was in graduate school, studying psychoanalytic literary theory and learning about Freud’s focus on the significance and meaning of dreams. 

Dreams in Literature

In fiction and poetry, the stuff of dreams is employed both well and poorly.  Consider Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, for instance, a richly descriptive poem based on a dream. And think of that classic adventure in Oz.  You learned a valuable lesson, Dorothy, but it was all just a dream.  Think of all the times we’ve seen the it-was-all-just-a-dream ploy used less successfully. Nevertheless, a writer’s dreams have inspired well-known works of literature, and dreams and dreaming serve to advance fictional plots and enliven poetry.

Dreams in Creative Nonfiction

Dreams are a fine resource for poets and fiction writers, but how can writers of creative nonfiction, a genre committed to facts and truth-telling, use their own dreams or the concept of dreaming in their work?

In her essay “What, to the Writer, Are Dreams?” Lauren Acampora defines dreams as “an engine, a lending library.” Like memories, then, dreams can serve as a storehouse of prompts for writing. Acampara explains that dreams provide us with insights about ourselves that arrive as if from somewhere external to ourselves:

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Dreaming occurs during REM sleep, when the frontal lobe, the executive area of the brain, is shut down. Dreams are the mysterious activity of another part of the brain, beneath the scrutiny of the frontal lobe. Neurologically speaking, we really are receiving transmissions from a foreign entity; the unconscious, unobserved self slips through the keyhole when the guard is off duty.

If analyzing dreams can uncover truths about the self that may not otherwise be accessible to a writer, aren’t dreams an ideal resource for those who write personal nonfiction?

Memoirist Cassandra Hamilton finds that they are.  In “Dreaming to Write,” she explains,

The smart writer analyzes dreams and mines them for gold. The more stirring a dream,     dream image or language used to describe the dream, the more built-in juice for the    writer. Take that opinionated reactive juice to the page and the writer will grip readers         with their slant on this topic.

The question is not so much whether dreams can be useful to a memoirist or personal essayist, but rather how to use them.

A Test Case

Last Saturday and Sunday, just before I woke up in the morning, I had vivid, disturbing dreams. 

In one, a person with whom I have had conflicts told me that he had taken my dog Sunny, who has been my sole companion and best friend for nine years, to the veterinary clinic and instructed the vet to put her down. My dream consisted of my race against the clock to stop the vet from carrying out his instructions.  I tried to call the vet, but all the numbers in my phone had been erased.  I tried to drive to the clinic to rescue Sunny, but my car was parked in a lot that was a sea of white cars that looked much like mine, and I couldn’t find it. 

In the second dream, I was in a shopping mall, and I had lost my purse. I backtracked, searching everywhere I had been while shopping, but couldn’t find it. Searching had taken hours, it seemed, so it was well past the time that I told my family that I would be home.  In the dream my daughters were children (they are, in fact, now grown and living independently), and I knew they would be worried about what happened to me.  Without my purse, which contained my car keys and phone, I couldn’t start my car or call for help. 

While I may or may not find it useful to describe these dreams in a work of personal nonfiction, I might be able to glean inspiration for writing from my interpretation of them.  In both dreams, I am separated from what is most important to me—in one, my dog; in the other, my daughters. In both, I am determined to reunite with these important figures in my life but am prevented from doing so. In both, I am overwhelmed by frustration and the pain of loss. 

For me, analyzing these dreams triggered an exploration of my current circumstances.  They caused me to recognize what I have gained and what I feel I have lost in the past few years. They called up memories that I might explore in my writing. 

Dream On

Some writers keep dream journals beside their beds.  They record the content of the dreams that they remember when they awaken. Dreams may tell us a story that we want to retell in our writing. Or they may allow access to the workings of our unconscious, and thereby provide us with truths about ourselves that we can explore in our memoirs or personal essays.  Either way, the stuff of dreams has potential value for nonfiction writers.