The Dreams of Writers

#5 in a series on dreams

The Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges famously stated that writing is nothing more than a guided dream, so it comes as no surprise that writers of all sorts have used their dreams as both the substance of their work, and an essential tool for creative problem solving. The examples are endless: Steven King built the plot of Salem’s Lot on one of his earliest childhood nightmares, and when his writing ground to halt as he neared the ending of the novel It, the solution came to him in a dream. One morning, William Styron awoke with a lingering vision of the protagonist and narrative arc for his novel Sophie’s Choice, later made into an Oscar-winning film. In the process of writing the groundbreaking graphic novel Maus, Art Spiegelman turned to his dreams on a near-daily basis to uncover the solutions to his writing snags. Across interviews and memoirs, authors often cite examples of dreams that crystallized their work, but just as frequently these discussions ripple outward, into moments where dreams played a pivotal role in their personal lives. This essay roves around both domains, intertwined as they are, following the ingenuity of dreams wherever it may lead.

In a culture where dreams are seen as incidental and insignificant, dreamers are islands. While combing through interviews, I encountered many authors who said some version of: “My dreams are like X, thus all dreams are like X,” and in the absence of evidence outside their own extrapolated to assume a universal. Which is completely understandable—we so rarely ever hear the dreams of others that we are never once in our lives exposed to the sheer range, variety, and scope of the nocturnal landscapes in which we might roam. And the more I read, the more I am struck by a sense that we vastly underestimate the potential available to us. Writers make use of dreams to solve problems, but the creative solution they receive is not merely a blunt answer. Dreams offer evolution, healing, and open us up to new directions and dimensions we cannot otherwise find. That is, if we will turn toward them, with real interest, intention and play.

1

Amy Tan is the author of six novels and as many books of non-fiction. Throughout her career, dreams have played a key role in her creative practice. When she hit a block in the process of writing her first novel—The Joy Luck Club, which became an instant bestseller on its release—she took the problem to bed and received the solution in a dream. 

Some of Tan’s most significant dreams came in her early twenties, well before her writing career had begun, in the aftermath of the murder of her close friend and college roommate, Pete. One night not long after his death, she began to dream, and Pete appeared. He invited her to visit the place where he now lived. It was an enchanted setting with many creatures flying through the air—elephants, camels, and people cruising around together in the skies. She wanted to fly, but because she wasn’t dead, she had no wings. Pete gestured to a little stand where wings could be rented for 25 cents, which she did. She was amazed by the feeling of elation and wonder as she took flight. Suddenly she had a thought, hey these wings only cost 25 cents. In that instant she began plummeting, terrified. Wait, just a moment ago I was flying completely fine, she thought, and once more she bobbed in mid-air, effortlessly buoyant. This cycle of plunging and easy weightlessness kept repeating, until she realized that it wasn’t about the wings, it was about her confidence. All her life to that point, she had stopped herself from doing what she truly wanted because she lacked the confidence. She relied on props—tricking herself with external reasons and circumstances—and now she could see that these methods were just as ridiculous and ornamental as 25-cent wings. She shared in an interview that the dream gave her a gut-level experience which dwarfed any waking realization she could have had, and catapulted her growth. In a primal sense, now she knew the screeching fear of falling, and what it felt like to literally soar with confidence.

Throughout the nine months of trial for Pete’s murder, she had these dreams. In each she was taken to a special place and given a lesson—sadly we don’t have an account of the entire series, may I suggest we all ask her to write a book about them—only three are mentioned in her interviews. The last was particularly haunting: After the trial concluded, in a dream Pete told her that it was time for him to move on, and time for her to go forward with her life. She became angry, fiercely protesting, but he was firm. You’re going to meet a woman named Rose, he said, and she’s going to be very influential to you in writing. She’s going to help you with writing. And with this the dreams stopped. 

In the last dream, Tan knew the person dream-Pete meant in waking life, but the connection seemed inexplicable. This particular Rose openly hated her, and, at the time, she had no idea Rose was a writer. Out of the blue, a year later Rose began to write letters to Tan, recommending books and confessing that she found herself strangely moved to do so. They became good friends, and as their exchange went on, Rose was one of the first people to suggest that Tan write fiction. In other words, not only do Tan’s dreams routinely offer creative solutions in her writing, they very literally nurtured and guided her through the growth—and even to one of the people she would need to meet—to begin her writing career, her vocation.

2

Born in 1904 in Berkhamstead, England, Graham Greene was regarded by many as a leading novelist of the 20^th century, and from an early age he had a keen interest in his dreams. He echoed Borges and spoke of his writing process as the unfolding of a guided dream—although, as a notoriously private man, he kept the nuts and bolts of that approach shrouded in mystery.

After his death, excerpts from his eight-hundred-page dream diary were published as A World of My Own, and in the introduction to that book he attributes the origin of many of his stories to dreams. To Greene, dreams were a world farfelu, an outlandish meeting of the unconscious and the imaginative, wherein the farthest-flung threads of our lives regularly intersect and tangle beyond time. 

There is another side to dreams, he wrote. They contain scraps of the future as well as the past. Greene was a careful reader of J. W. Dunne’s influential 1927 book on dreams, titled An Experiment with Time. Dunne’s book advanced a multidimensional theory of time, and suggested that the dreaming mind may at times loosen its gaze, slipping from the present into an expansion that can admit moments of the past and future. Greene endorsed Dunne’s views, and although he did not share strictly precognitive examples from his own experience, he definitely had a gift for uncanny, information-arriving-from-seemingly-nowhere dreams of a very particular type. 

At the tender age of 7, Greene dreamed of a catastrophic shipwreck on the same night as the Titanic disaster. As an adult, on two more completely separate occasions, he again dreamt of shipwrecks concurrent with real-world events. On one of those evenings, in a dream he was forced to jump overboard from a ship to what seemed like certain death. That same night, a ship crashed off the Yorkshire coast in a storm, and the Captain ordered his men to jump into the sea as their only hope; all but two were drowned. It’s awfully strange, Greene wrote of the incident. Of course on an occasion like that there must be terrific mental waves of terror, and my mind seems to be particularly attuned to the terror-of-drowning wave. It is as if Greene possessed a special antenna, sensitively tuned to just one psychic station. Much like Greene, Dunne, and others of countless cultures that precede us, I too have found that dreams allow access to information that would otherwise be concealed, or simply inaccessible to waking consciousness. What comes through is very delicately related to the facilities and state of the dreamer.

It wasn’t just Greene—Dunne’s theory of precognitive dreaming got an entire generation of fiction writers fired up, inspiring time-shifting story lines and worlds in the works of household names like J. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, and many more. Vladimir Nabokov followed Dunne’s instructions to the letter and compiled a book of his own precognitive dream-dabbling, with some modest success, and these ideas inspired his work on a later novel. James Joyce was yet another who held Dunne’s book in high regard, in keeping with his own precognitive dream experiences. Then a resident of Paris, one night Joyce dreamed of walking through a big city, and on his ramble met three men who called themselves Minos, Eaque, and Rhadamanthe. They suddenly became threatening, then abusive, and Joyce ran to escape from their violent screams. Three weeks later, the Paris press broke news that police were searching for a man sending explosives through the mail who signed himself ‘Minos, Eaque, Rhadamanthe’—the Judges of Hell from Greek mythology. 

Did Joyce, who was super attuned to Greek myths, have exactly the antenna necessary to pick up such a reference in the local etheric soup, much as Greene seems to have had an uncanny terror-of-drowning receptivity? Joyce did not elaborate on how his dream fit his personal circumstances at the time, but in my experience, most incidents of this type have meaning for the dreamer on many levels. The prevailing Western cultural view of information as clinical, bloodless, ones-and-zeros or disembodied facts does not match in any sense how information actually flows in dreams. In the messy practice of dreaming, information has a kind of charge and structure, just as we ourselves are charged and structured beings with a complexity that far exceeds our awareness, and in our dreams information flows along paths that seek a curious, often mysterious affinity.

3

As the foremost mystic of eighteenth-century Britain, William Blake was pretty tapped in from birth. As the age of 4, the “head of god” appeared to him just outside a two-story window, causing him to scream in fright, and at age 9, during a walk in the country he beheld a tree full of angels with wings as bright as stars among the branches. From a young age, Blake wanted to become an artist, but his family didn’t have the funds to secure him a painting apprenticeship, so he learned the trade of engraving instead. Throughout his twenties he scraped by as a professional engraver, and on the side, his first volume of poetry was published after friends pitched in to get 40 copies printed. 

Around the age of 30, Blake had finished writing the poems that would be collected in his now-famous Songs of Innocence, though at the time he had no idea how to publish them. He longed to somehow bring together both his poems and his art in a single work, but lacked the means to create and publish such a newfangled thing. In those days, text had to be typeset and printed on a press, while illustrations were produced in a separate and laborious printmaking process, so to combine both text and image in a single volume involved considerable expense, none of which he could afford. Nor did he have any hope of finding a publisher for his non-commercial, renegade ideas. 

For months Blake was agitated by this problem, with no solution forthcoming. One night, his beloved brother Robert, who had died the prior year from tuberculosis, appeared to him in a dream and revealed the specific technical process by which he could produce the work. The method Robert described was revolutionary: It would enable Blake to print both the words of his poems and the images to illustrate them via the same copper plate. He could etch the text and images together with a new flexibility and speed, print them himself on his own press, and fill in extra details by hand-painting to the level of finish he desired. The next morning, Mrs Blake set out with half a crown—all the money they had—and with a portion of it purchased the first batch of materials Blake would need to put this method into practice. He called this process, “Illuminated Printing,” and it would become the foundation of his work for the rest of his life. The sinuous visions of nature, gods, and demons woven through and around his writing, which now hang in the Tate, Metropolitan Museum, and museums around the world, were produced with this method. The contents of Blake’s work could hardly be more dream-like, so it is particularly fitting that the very technology on which his most imaginative creation and production would hinge came to him in a dream.

4

Born in 1933 in Macon, North Carolina, Reynolds Price was a poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and Professor of English at Duke University. He had an early interest in dreams, and once he began writing, they fed directly into his poetry and novels. One evening in 1978, he had a dream that seemed particularly eerie:

In the dream I’m this mysterious solitary person and there is some kind of guide beside me. I’m being led through this incredibly beautiful house by a man who keeps saying, “Well, this is yours, this beautiful place; and in it are all the pictures you’ve ever wanted, all the books. It’s all here; you’ve got this.” Then I say to the guide, “Well, this is fantastic. Am I going to be alone here?” And he says, “Oh no. Come with me,” and he opens this closet in the front hall. It’s a normal closet with nice new clothes and hats. Then he pulls the clothes aside, and there’s this human being who’s literally been crucified in the closet—this man who’s been terribly beaten, and he’s hanging on a cross. The guide says, “This is yours forever.” At the end of the dream I felt very happy. I woke up and thought, My God! What kind of weird religious fantasy is this? 

To Price, this dream was a hauntingly beautiful story. He had lived alone all his life, in a house too big for one person surrounded by things he had collected and loved, and he considered the dream to be a reflection on his singleness. He turned its images into a poem, titled The Dream of a House, first published in his collection Vital Provisions, and from there he thought no more of it. Six years later, doctors discovered a ten-inch cancerous tumor braided through his spinal cord. In an interview, he described the diagnosis as a kind of torturous companion that would accompany him for the rest of his life. When he first heard the news, he realized the long-forgotten dream had been a premonition, arriving many years before he’d had the slightest awareness that anything was amiss. 

After Price’s initial surgery and radiation, doctors gave him a dire prognosis, with only a matter of months to live. This sparked a run of new dreams that dealt with the cancer and his reaction to it. He described his dreams from that time as particularly strong and confrontational, in which he acted out a personal refusal to die. It would have been easy to obey his doctors’ prediction, he later said, but his dreams convinced him to fight. The radiation treatment left him paraplegic, yet he became an even more prolific writer and went on to publish another thirty books in almost as many years, including novels, memoirs, and collected essays. In his dryly-titled memoir, A Whole New Life, he wrote that the catastrophe had “brought more in and sent more out—more love and care, more knowledge and patience, more work in less time.”

Only a dreamer can truly unravel a dream, let alone one of that magnitude. It does seem as if the dream suggested deep meaning: that hardship can be salvation, even redemption, ending as it did on a remarkable note with such happiness. Price’s glimpse of his closet companion in the dream was not the end, it was a kind of beginning, an initiation into the core of his new life in that mystic house. It is fascinating that while doctors predicted his early death post-surgery, all along his psyche knew both of the danger, and that much more was to come.

5

In the midst of a six-year custody battle with her second ex-husband, Sue Grafton began to fantasize about murder and devised the clever poisoning scheme which would become the basis for her novel A is for Alibi, published in 1982. Her subsequent series of hard-boiled mystery novels—one for each letter of the alphabet from A through Y—featured a wise-cracking private investigator she described as a younger, thinner, and braver version of herself.

In the process of writing 25 mystery novels, Grafton developed a unique and intimate relationship with her dreams. Whole lines of dialogue, observations, story twists, plot connections, and unexpected layering came to her in dreams. Dreams offered her a release from the analytical side of mind, with an invitation to openness, creativity, and whimsy. They were also a channel to darkness, ready to be mined in her work. She welcomed her nightmares as gifts, because they precisely re-created the physiology of danger, horror, and heart-thumping fear she needed to animate her fictional characters. When she was heavily involved in a book—which seems to have been quite often, given that she published a novel every one to two years for a couple decades—she would give herself the suggestion that a solution will come as she went to sleep. And often, when she woke up, there it was.

Grafton called her dreaming mind “right brain,” and as a part of her creative process, she wrote thoughtful (but firm) notes to right brain, with gentle requests like this:

Dream incubation is the practice of going to sleep with the intention to have a dream for a specific purpose. For thousands of years, it has been a common, and in many cases, the foundational method for all sorts of thorny-life-problem-solving across Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, China, Japan, Australia, India, and throughout the Americas, from the Navajo of New Mexico to the Dené of the Canadian interior. Western culture is a relatively recent aberration from the historical norm for having largely forgotten this ancient practice—but as we have seen, many writers have been undeterred, and made the practice their own.

Myriad rituals and elaborate customs have been created across time for the purpose of successfully incubating dreams, but in essence they boil down to two simple actions that anyone can use: 1) be aware of the problem, and 2) hold an intention that the solution will come at the time you go to sleep. Sue Grafton seems to have infused this approach with a rare spirit and wisdom—there is a lighthearted, but no less sophisticated, sense of play, familiarity, and open-hearted trust in her dialogue with her dreaming self. What she gave, she more than received. It is a reminder that we are always in a relationship with our dreams. They are not static, they evolve anew with the energy we bring to them each night. The unconscious longs for ways to get in touch with us, she said. All you have to do is ask.

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Sources: Writers Dreaming: Twenty-six Writers Talk About Their Dreams and Creative Process by Naomi Epel; The World Dream Bank; The Oxford Book of Dreams, edited by Stephen Brook; The Life of Blake by Alexander Gilchrist; Grahame Greene’s autobiography A Sort of Life and his dream diary A World of My Own; James Joyce’s precognitive dream was recounted in Man From Babel by Eugene Jolas. There are many brilliant writers whose dreams I would love to have explored here, but an inquiry of this sort is tightly constrained by the material that happens to be publicly accessible.

Preview image: Jupiter and Io by Jason Major