Oh, I See Queen Mab Hath Been With You
Cross-posted from The Midnight Hour
I’m going to commit a sin here and disagree with Shakespeare. Dreams can be the child of an idle brain, but they are often (I might even say more often) the product of a very active brain.
A lot of fellow creatives will shake their heads and turn interesting shades of pale when I ask how their dreams have been. If they’re working on a project that absorbs them, most of the time their voices will drop and they’ll answer, “Funny you should ask. The other night I had this nightmare…”
As you will have no doubt guessed, dear Reader, I am writing this while still shaking and sweating from a nightmare. It was a real doozy, too, plotted like a Hollywood thriller, with a bad guy who seemed omniscient, danger to the vulnerable, and little details that made it real. I dream in color, too, real screaming Technicolor, so sometimes when I wake this pale world seems like the unreality.
I’ve always had bad dreams, and after my teen years they escalated into nightmares; mostly, I suspect, because of trauma processing. It’s a pet theory of mine that you can work things out in dreams you maybe can’t work out in real life. Anyway, when I started writing full-time, and again when it really began to hit home that I was a professional writer, as in “I do this and get paid for it,” I had periods of very intense dreams and nightmares.
Now, whenever I’m working on a project I’m intensely emotionally-involved with, the dreams come back, trailing their dresses in the mud and clustering around my prone sleeping body. This most current spate of highly-colored and charged nightmovies is probably because I’m in the middle of revising the first Jill Kismet book, and that’s a series that cuts pretty close to the bone for a number of reasons, not the least because of the background of the main character.
I think these dreams happen because the state of writing, when you’re in the groove and everything is flowing fine, is close to a dream state. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the brainwaves were similar, were they to be mapped. The intense creative state has its own logic and its own synchronicity, just like dreaming. When one spends a lot of time in that creative state, I shouldn’t wonder that the same muscles that rake up the compost pile in the bottom of one’s head also twitch during sleep. Many is the time I’ve awakened with not only a doozy of a nightmare to remember, but also the solution to a complicated plot tangle–in real life or in fiction–looming next to my bed.
Most useful of all are those dreams that are not quite nightmares, but are so intense and call up such complicated feelings that we call them nightmares. (A note to the gods of the English language: we need more words for pleasure, pain, and dreaming.) Often these dreams turn into stories–the Society series was the result of such a recurring dream, and several of the sequences in Dead Man Rising had their inception in dreams. (The only other book in the Valentine series that I dreamed was the final book, To Hell And Back, but those dreams were more along the line of panicking about deadlines.)
Images from dreams are often highly-charged and provide good artistic mileage. And who hasn’t awakened from a particularly intense dream and felt almost cleansed once the heart stops hammering and the sweating stops and you’ve checked the whole house for monsters?
It’s sometimes a catch-22 for me. Either I can’t sleep, or when I do I dream such emotionally-charged things I wake up feeling tired. And then there’s the dreams when the weather changes…
I often counsel other creatives to keep a dream journal next to the bed. Often this will help you remember your dreams, and you can look back through it for patterns and themes. (All things serve the writing, you know.)
Since I started out with Shakespeare I’ll quote a bit of my favorite: Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. You know, both Rom and Julie are useless. I prefer Mercutio and Tybalt. Why Shakespeare didn’t write slash about them is beyond me.
…. O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream…
And when she visits writers, we wake up and blog about plot tangles. Heh.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
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