Internal Inspiration without Perspiration

Most of the great ideas I get for my works come from my dreams. From the earliest I can remember, I have always had vivid and colorful dreams. I began lucid dreaming (realizing I was in a dream while in a dream) at about age five. I would then control the dream world within my head and do whatever I felt like.

As I grew into middle school, I remember seeing an episode of 'Batman The Animated Series', where Batman realized he was being manipulated by the Riddler in his dreams, by the fact that he picked up a newspaper and the words were all jumbled.

Apparently, the literate part of your brain and the part you dream with are supposed to be far apart from one another. This was the reason for Batman not being able to read, and thus figuring out the Riddler was messing with him.

Well, I saw this as a challenge. In my dreams for the next year or so, every time I was lucid, I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and began writing and signing my name, over and over again, until eventually, I could read in my dreams.

As I grew into high school I experienced a few other dream no-no's. The first was pain. I had always thought that it was lame in movies for bad guys to go down after one shot to the gut, or a stab in the back. In a dream I had where I was at some drug dealer's poker game for some reason, things went sour and a gunfight ensued. I was just a bystander with no armaments, and I ended up taking three slugs to the abdomen. I remember the pain being crippling, the hot pieces of metal draining my very will. All I wanted to do was lie down and die. Like in the movies!

As I grew into college, I had a third dream no-no. It is much more difficult for the male brain to facilitate a female voice, so most voices in dreams are male. I sharply remember hearing the voice of a girl I had known in high school in a dream of mine. Later I noticed lots of female voices in my dreams. How nice for me, it's not just a vocal sausage fest.

I enjoy every bit of creativity that comes from my subconscious, and as such, I like to recall as many of my dreams as possible. I had heard, tested, and verified, that if you want to increase your remembrance of dreams upon waking, one way to do it is to log all the dreams you do remember in a journal, or dream log.

I currently keep as many of my dreams as I can remember on a log that is actually part of a forum. If you wish to look into my night-mind, I am the most avid poster of the subject at this link: Odd Dreams?.

There are a few dreams I have had that I can't log on that site...as they are too disturbing to the outer facade of the average human, but this is the internet! So, if you wish to see my darker dreams, they will be appearing on my sister site: http://casualsurfer.myblogsite.com/

There are another select version of dreams that will simply not be posted at all. I am sorry to say to you reader, that these dreams are not private because I am shamed, they are private because I am proud. For example I had one dream where I had read an entire graphic novel from cover to cover. I woke up, checked the internet to make sure it didn't exist, and now I am having my sister, a great artist, illustrate it. Giving away dreams like these would be giving my earning potentials and publishing potential away.

So, the only dreams that will be kept from you, reader, are those I will put up on store shelves.