Around two months ago, I rediscovered a dream journal I’d kept on another blogging website for around 2½ months in 2011. At present, all the entries are locked away, but the pinned entry suggests that mutual friends were welcome to follow it, and there’s an overview of my motivation.
I was inspired by a blogger friend who often experienced called WILD, or Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming, and how she found it a great source of inspiration for writing. This would have been less than a year after I started with the former National Novel Writing Month the previous year, so I was keen to try anything.
I did talk in the pinned entry about general techniques for falling asleep and how to check whether you’re in a lucid dream. At the time, I didn’t seem to realise there is a specific technique for learning how to induce WILD that would only have been a Yahoo! search away. What a missed opportunity.
I didn’t intend for the project to last any specific period; I didn’t set a time frame at all. It was just to there to store the material for use at a future date.
From the first entry on 27 July 2011, I made 11 regular updates – excluding the pinned post – with fragments of dreams I’d had over the last few days. One phrase that appears a lot is Forgotten on Waking, and that became the subtitle for the blog.
So what of the actual contents?
I need to be selective about what I post because some people referenced are still around. Other fragments have been tagged NSFW, or Not Safe for Work, whereas this WordPress blog is firmly PG. But there are some repeatable gems, reproduced here with the original grammar intact:
- 24 July: 1 saw round poles about 100mm wide and 1m long, with a large, “knob,” at the end of each, with an eight- or nine-letter word beginning with H word stamped on the handle. They were placed in a bucket in a white room like an art gallery. Still in the art gallery, I was impressed by a stand that held six posters – two wide and three tall – being folded up into a box shape about 50cm cubed.
- 31 July: I was arranging with a friend to pick up a crisis loan of £100 on my behalf and him asking via text message if he could use some of the money to travel back to give it to me. He replied, “If I don’t enjoy it, I’ll go away and never speak to you again.”
- 12 August: Dream 1, fragment: I learnt that the two men who operated the puppets on The Sooty Show were Army reservists, so they could only film when they weren’t required to be on duty.
Reading these again after 15 years, I can see why I thought they might eventually prove useful. The Sooty Show fragment in particular feels like the sort of premise that might make for a good short story, although I’d fictionalise the TV show. Even the objects in the art gallery objects might worm their way into the description of a scene.
While writing this entry, I intermittently thought about restarting the journal, maybe for a limited period, but it’s not a reliable method of generating writing prompts, Eleven entries across 2½ months isn’t exactly a production line, particularly when so many of them amount to Forgotten on Waking. The process also requires the will and the means to make notes immediately after waking up.
Rather, the value of this collection is closer to keeping a box of miscellaneous electrical wires. Most won’t have any practical use, but you might occasionally need one for a particular project.
Perhaps that’s enough reason to keep the journal as a fossil: you never know when you’ll need a mysterious art installation, a crisis loan, or an Army reservist puppeteer.
