Saturday, February 09, 2008

Wow. *LOVE* It When I Figure Things Out in My Sleep

So, I've been dreaming an awful lot lately. Not bad dreams, really, but weird dreams and vivid dreams, and dreams I've been remembering. Now, I think this is actually a really good thing, related to the fact that I'm eating well and (when not sniffling) working out (and not drinking alcohol regularly). But so anyway, the dreams.

I'm not going to tell you in detail about them, because it's boring to read about other people's dreams. Suffice it to say that I had a series of dreams before waking up this morning. To the naked eye, these dreams were unrelated. One appeared superficially to be about FB; one appeared to be about my parents (and my mom specifically); and the last one appeared to be about work.

Turns out, my friends, that ALL of the dreams were about work. It seems that in my dream about work, I brought all of the pieces of the other dreams together. I just spent the past 20 minutes sketching out exactly what I'm going to do in the article I'm writing, linking it to what I discussed in the MLA paper, and figuring out why it's important both in terms of what I've said before about aesthetics for women writers as well as in terms of how we talk about the writers I discuss in terms of literary period. Yep, all that, in 20 minutes. And from a freaking dream. (Well, or the dream helped to bring it together. I'm going to admit that I've been thinking a lot about this stuff, and generally right before bed, all week long, so the dream was the result of much labor on my part, and yes, I really do believe that considering such things in a meditative way before going to sleep does help one resolve them, which is a bit hippy dippy for my taste, but if it works I'm willing to overlook it.)

So, the sunshine is shining brightly, I'm filled with lots of ideas, and I am hoping to get solidly to work on some of the article things, now that I know where I'm heading with it. Hooray for dreams that are productive!!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

dude, I loooove reading other people's dreams. I also love when I figure things out in my sleep.

Dr. Crazy said...

Aw, now I wish I would have written about what I actually dreamed! Part of the problem is, though, that in translating the dreams into the article, I've kind of lost what the first couple of dreams were about. The first is very vague; all I really remember in detail about the second is being really vicious to my mom. In the third, though, I had somehow gotten Notoriously Reluctant To Speak To Critics author to agree to let me interview her, and I had a lengthy conversation with her about what I was thinking about her work, and she was weirdly responsive once she figured out that I wasn't trying to assign some sort of identity to her or to categorize her in a narrow way.

Unlike my recurring dreams where I am in a meeting with my dissertation director and I think I've figured everything out only to wake up remembering nothing, my conversation with NRTSTC author was wildly productive and illuminating and I remembered exactly what I got out of the conversation upon waking, and also in the conversation she somehow linked what I'd been up to in the previous dreams to what I'd been thinking about her work, and she was excited that we were thinking about things in a way that was sympathetic to one another.

(I should note that this very thing is what makes it a dream, as this author would most likely hate what I'm thinking as much as she hates what most critics think, and I doubt she'd like anything I was doing very much.)