Crazy Dreams

THANKS FOR SHARING YOUR DREAMS WITH ME! THEY WERE SO INTERESTING. I USED A RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR TO PICK THE THREE WINNERS OF A COPY OF HUNGER UNTAMED. PLEASE EMAIL ME AT PAMELA@PAMELAPALMER.NET.

AMY PLUM

STEPHANIE

CHELSEA B.

I'm a dreamer. Most novelists are, I suppose, but the kind of dreaming I'm talking about here are night dreams, the ones we can't control. I know there have been a lot of books written about dreams and how to interpret them, but I'm not sure how much I buy the psychology behind dreams. Sometimes I think my brain just needs to play.

I have multiple dreams every night, most of which I remember upon waking. And I even start to dream before I'm fully asleep these days. In fact, that's how I know I'm close to falling asleep--I start to see dream people or scenes. Just little snippets.

My reason for writing this blog, though, is to know more about your dreams. I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours, as it were.

One of the weirdest things about my dreams, to me at least, is that every single time I dream I'm in my house (which is fairly often), it's nothing like my house, or like any other house I've ever dreamed about. The setting is different, the layout, the decor. Sometimes it's much larger than my real house, sometimes far smaller. I'm beginning to think I have a frustrated architect lurking in my subconscious. Why does my mind keep creating new houses? It doesn't make any sense to me, not when I've lived in this one for thirteen years and I both live and work here. You'd think that just once I'd dream my real house. But no. Never. It's always some place I've never seen.

The actual dreams themselves are sometimes the usual 'I need to be somewhere and can't seem to get there' dreams. But more often than not, they're crazy. And in a weird way, fun.

Two nights ago, I dreamed I was in a group getting ready to run a race. A marathon-type road race, I think. My mom was standing beside me in lime green high heels and I was in flip flops, thinking we hadn't prepared for this very well. The race was indoors, but not on any kind of straight track. The track was dirt and quickly disappeared from sight after the first length which was at a solid forty-five degree angle to the ground. And, okay, climbing a forty-five degree angle dirt incline with no hand holds would have been tough, if not downright impossible, but this was my dream. Just as the race began and my mother went zipping up that incline in her lime green high heels, all these rats and mice started pouring down the path as if looking for an escape. My mom's terrified of mice, so I was glad she hadn't seen them, but it occurred to me that animals escaping like that probably meant we were about to experience a natural disaster, probably another earthquake. I shrugged, decided I could run pretty fast, and headed after Mom.

In last night's dream, I was in a house with several others. We'd realized, too late, that the aliens/monsters were in there, but there was no escape. Our only chance of survival was to lie down amongst the bodies littering the floor, pretend we were dead, and hope they couldn't tell that we weren't. I remember thinking that most of the bodies were lying on their backs, but there was no way I could fake it like that, so I laid down on my stomach, partially hiding my face. After awhile, my DH, who had followed the monsters out, came back to tell us they were gone. Now, this should have been a nightmare, but I don't see dreams in detail, not full detail, at least. I see snippets and my brain fills in the rest. I never saw the dead bodies except out of the corner of my eye, and then only a hand or face here and there, and no blood. I remember thinking I was breathing too hard. The monsters would know I wasn't dead. But my heart wasn't racing. I wasn't really afraid. It wasn't real enough to scare me, just real enough to be kind of exciting.

I have these kinds of dreams all the time. The latter, especially, I call my action/adventure dreams and I love them.

Oh, and another thing. Sometimes, in my dreams, I'm one of the teenagers. Sometimes one of the adults. And it can flip in the same dream.

What about you? What I really want to know is, do you create new architecture with every dream, like I do? Do you dream you're a teen (if you're not any longer)? Tell me anything about your dreams (even that you don't remember them) and I'll choose three posters to get a signed copy of Hunger Untamed.

Happy dreaming!