My grandmother recently remarried some guy named Paul. Paul is a tall man, younger than my 80 something or so grandmother by 20-30 years. Although he’s not fat, his grizzled, partially-shaven face is slightly pudgy and his eyes are a cold grey blue. His short dark hair is speckled with little bits of white. He doesn’t talk much–in fact, I’ve never heard him speak. The house was full of people when I saw them and my grandmother, although quite sick, seemed to have been able to pull herself together a little bit in order to mingle with the rest of the family. Paul hovered behind, ready to hold her up if she faltered. She was so busy talking to others that she didn’t see me.

I’m upset because my grandmother’s health has been failing and it shouldn’t be this guy Paul who is taking care of her. My grandfather, who seemed somewhat broken and embarrassed by the whole thing, should be the one walking behind his wife of nearly 70 years. I was so upset that I cornered my father when he was putting away coats in the closet in my brother’s bedroom (we had so many visitors in the house that day that the other closets were full). I asked him what happened with grandma and grandpa and he just shook his head and muttered something about how they have always got along about as well as vinegar and nails and I shouldn’t be surprised. Especially since it all started when he was young and because he was such a terror to live with. I tried to find out more about what “it” was and what my father ever did that was terror-inducing, but he wasn’t forthcoming.

Later, when talking to a small group of relatives and friends, I found that my grandparents were going to have a baby but the in-utero baby had been diagnosed with an extremely rare stomach disease that would result in death if food were ever to reach its stomach. We had an incredulous discussion–about how on earth that my grandmother could have become pregnant but even more so on how the baby would live. Would they just find some way for the child to be intravenously fed for the rest of its life? It was a heavy, strange and intense discussion.

The longer I was there, the more I was wondering why we had been brought together in such a way. I had come to visit on a whim, and was surprised to find so much of the family there. Something just didn’t add up and when I talked to others there, I found that no one was actually invited. Instead they had been compelled to come for a visit. Who would want all of us there? Why would they gather all of the family in one place? It made no sense. It felt wrong–dangerously wrong.

It was at this point that my cat started to climb all over me and I was jolted out of my dream. I was angry at my sweet kitty–I really wanted to know what was going to happen! I have extremely vivid, movie-like dreams that I wish I could record for viewing when I’m more lucid. There was a lot more to this dream, actually, and it was full of intrigue. Where do these images come from? Do they actually mean anything? My grandmother has been dead for 7 or 8 years now. Paul is someone I had never seen before, but he was in detail, as you can see. The scene took place primarily at the house in which we grew up and that I haven’t been inside for nearly 25 years. There was mystery, some supernatural, some hints of the surreal and I could only manage to capture what you have read above.

I am always intrigued by writers who spin tales out of the dreams that they have. I always think that many of my dreams would make excellent novels or movies or the like, but just don’t have the wherewithal to be able to record them in enough detail. I have tried to keep a dream diary but it always fails miserably. I never wake up in the night to write anything down and in the morning there is just too much going on. I try to tell my husband Joe what I remember as soon as I can but that often escapes as soon as I start to wake up enough to describe what I saw behind my closed eyelids. On occasion, telling him will keep the dream in memory long enough for me to manage to blog about it or jot it down in my sometimes journal.

Some very well-known bits of writing have come from dreams. William Styron found the insipiration for Sophie’s Choice from a dream about a beautiful young woman he had known years before. Of course, Coleridge and Kubla Khan are all well known…opium apparently gives you fantastic dreams. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the plot for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He wrote in his book, Across the Plains: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.”

There is a book I should pick up, called Writers Dreaming, which includes interviews with 26 writers (Stephen King, Maya Angelou and others) about how dreams have shaped their writing.

I’d be curious to know how any of you reading have had your writing or actions in your lives shaped by your dreams.