Dream Logic

I had a writing anxiety dream last night–I’ve said it before on this blog, my unconscious is subtle like a brick to the head, so you’ll laugh at how blatant it was–but some of the internal logic of it interested me more than the central narrative.

In the dream, I had a different publisher, and they sent a woman who was going to help me brainstorm and outline books 5 and 6. She was terrible at it, of course, and we ended up arguing over one of the points of contention I have sometimes with first readers, which is that I often like to set out my emotional beats first, and then figure out the logistics around getting to those beats second. There was going to be a safe with some plot-important papers in the book, and the woman was going on and on about different kinds of locks while I was trying to tell her that the character would leave it open, because he trusted another character so much. The trust was an important emotional beat!

Anyway, what interested me was that my actual mental outlines felt like they were stored in some fairly inaccessible-while-dreaming brain section. In the dream, I struggled and struggled to remember them, which didn’t seem to be the point of the dream narrative, it legitimately felt like I couldn’t get to them. I mean, if you asked me now, I’d be able to be like, “Book 5: boom! a couple sentences! Book 6: boom! a couple sentences!” In the end, I thought I had “remembered” them, and I think I even got book 6 mostly right (In that I decided it revolved around [Spoilery Character], not anything more), but book 5 in the dream was something entirely made up. A safe? Important papers? Neither of those things are in it.

Dreams are intriguing.