Life, the universe and ... oh, whatever ...

Friday, July 22, 2005

Dreamland

I have a very vivid imagination. This is something that you should think a blessing for someone who wants to make a living out of writing down stories for other people to read. In many ways it is a blessing, but not always.

When I'm in my bed in the evening, lights turned out - that's when many of my stories comes to me. Not like a complete story told from A to Z, but like glimpses of stories - pieces, images, like parts of movies running in my head. I don't very often write these scenes down, just because I have experienced that if they actually are a part of a bigger story they will eventually come back to me when the rest of the story is ready to be told.

Often this pictures, short scenes that come to me are intriguing, interesting, and I toy around with them, trying to find out what sort of story they belong to. But, sometimes my mind wanders places I'd sort of rather not want to go - the really dark places. From the dark places comes the horrible, scary stories - and the images that follow them are sometimes so ugly and so terrifying that they appal me. Sometimes I think that I must be sick to have images like these in my mind, but really - what would be really sick was if I had these images and wasn't appalled by them, or scared or sick - then there surely would be something wrong with me.

Some of these horrible images are as taken out of real life, terrifying tales of murder or torture - but as I am a big fan of fantasy and science fiction stories, many of the "movies in my head" are also of that kind. There are no limits to the sort of monster stories my mind can come up with to scare the living daylights out of me. And one thing are these stories that bother me while I'm still awake, because these I can push away, if not exactly easily, but still, I can force myself to think of other things if the stories get to bad.

My dreams however, that's a completely different story. Most of the time I have wonderful dreams. As I said, I'm really into fantasy stories, and because of this, most of my dreams are fantastic too. I can have dreams that go on for days or weeks, that is, every night when I go to sleep I might continue a dream from the previous night. In these dreams there is magic, and fantastic creatures - and much of it is so amazing. But like all fantastic stories there are also the bad guys in my dreams - and some of these are so bad I wake almost screaming. When my dreams go bad it haunts me. I must struggle to get out of the dream and wake up, and when I do wake up I can't just shake the dream out of my head and go back to sleep because if I do - then I'll immediately step right back into the dream where I got out of it, and that's no good. So, when the dreams go terribly bad and I manage to get out of it by waking up, I have to turn on the light and spend some time trying to get it out of my head. Which is very hard, because first of all, with my imagination the story just continues in my head after I've woken up, exploring all the ways the story might continue - and also because, even though I'm scared stiff by the dream, often the story seems so interesting it would be a shame to waste it by forcing myself to get it out of my head.

The problem very often is that when I fight these bad dreams at night and wake up, I also almost immediately look at the watch to find out how many hours are left till I have to get up to work - and I always know that I need to get back to sleep pretty soon to get enough sleep to get up in the morning - so there is really no time to pursue the dreams when awake.

This is something I hope will change when I'm made redundant from New Year - then when I wake up screaming at night, I can actually turn on the light and go to work exploring the dreams and the stories that come from them, writing things down - and getting something out of the bad dreams - and in that way hopefully get them out of my head.

So, a vivid imagination, I guess it is both a curse and a blessing - I certainly wouldn't want to be without it - even though it gives me some really tough mornings because I have had way to little sleep that night!

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