Adam Lively: Writer – Literary Mentoring and Coaching

This month we enter the twilight zone where reality, dream and fiction join hands and dance together. . .

To start with the familiar world of everyday “reality”: dreams are an integral and universal part of human experience – men and women have always dreamed, whether they like it or not. We’re not concerned here with scientific explanations of dreaming (though of course those might play a part in science fiction. . .), but with its meaning and value for our lived lives. The meanings and values attached to dreams differ in different cultures. Dreams crop up frequently in Ancient Greek tragedy, for example, and in Homer – and there, more often than not, their role is prophetic: dreams give us hallucinatory glimpses of the future. In modern times, by contrast, we’re more likely to think of psychology than prophecy when it comes to dreams: dreams give us glimpses of the dreamer’s unconscious mind. Cultures of the future may come up with evaluations of dreams that we haven’t even (pardon the pun) dreamt of. . .

Our modern psychological approach to dreams makes them an attractive resource for the fiction writer or dramatist, a way of adding depth to characterization. (But there’s always a danger of falling back on them as a facile and schematic short-cut. One friend of mine is so averse to writers doing this, that if he’s reading a novel and the author starts telling him about some dream that of one of the characters has had, he will, as a point of honour and principle, put the book aside and refuse to read another word.)

There’s another aspect to the relationship between dreaming and fiction. When we’re dreaming (and leaving aside certain hypnagogic states of “lucid dreaming”), we’re completely absorbed (or in the case of a nightmare, trapped) in the dream – it becomes a new reality. Writers and philosophers have long been fascinated by the uncertain relation between dream and “reality” (it’s a major preoccupation of Jose Luis Borges’s enigmatic short stories, for example). The basic thought is expressed in a famous passage from the Book of Chuang Tzu, a foundational text of Chinese Taoism, dating from the fourth century BCE:

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things.

                                        The Book of Chuang Tzu (Penguin Classics) Ch. 2

(For a modern take on this idea, but given a nightmarish cast, I’d recommend the wonderfully dark and sinister short story “The Night Face Up” by Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar (included in the collection Blow-Up and Other Stories) . . .)

And there’s another question. Are we right to corral dreaming into a separate compartment marked “sleep” or “the unconscious”? What of the day-dreams, the fantasies, that can nurture our deepest and most important values and aspirations? (When Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, he wasn’t talking about falling asleep.) Or what of the “fictive dream” that we enter when we open the pages of a novel? Are they too not “dreaming” . . .? Is dream – considered in its widest sense, as imagination – not a substantial part of reality?

And what of the relationship between dreaming and creativity? How, as writers, can we harness the effortless, natural creativity of dreaming in the activity of writing, where creativity can all too often seem effortful and unnatural?

The questions unfurl. . . the dream goes on. . .