Discover the Treasure in Your Dreams

If you don’t use your dreams in your writing, you’re missing out on your own creative ideas generator. So this week’s exercise isn’t writing as such, it’s research into what makes YOU tick, and what’s important to you.

You’ll find out what makes you tick when you make notes on your dreams for a month or two.

Everyone dreams. Yes, even if you think you don’t. :-)

Vital: the emotions in your dreams — emotions are powerful idea generators
Take particular notice of the emotions in your dreams. Emotions can act like fishhooks cast into your creative source. Oddly enough, no one seems to talk about writing and using emotion to enhance creativity, but you’ll find that if you can recall an emotion, it will spark off a stream of images. (Emotions are tied to memories.)

At this stage, you’re not interested in story lines, or ideas as such. You’re interested in IMAGES. These images are powerful, because they’re your symbols. They will bring you ideas for your writing, even entire plots, or specific ideas suitable for a magazine you’re targeting, months and years after you first dreamed them.

Record as many images as you remember.

Since we have several dreams every night, dream recording can turn into a full-time job. In order to minimize the time your dream-recording takes, use this template:

* Dream Title - pick the first few words which come to you, don’t over-think this

* Dream Emotion (primary, secondary)

* Visuals (images) - the images are vital, just list them. You can work with them later to see what productive ideas they conjure up.

It shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes to record the essentials — title, emotion, visuals — each morning.

Exercise 24. Start a dream journal.

You can record your dreams in your writing journal, or in an app like Evernote. On the other hand, if you want to use a "dream journal" — a notebook in which you hand write your dreams — by all means do that.