The Creative Dreams of Writers

Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel provides an anthology of dreams that writers such as Isabel Allende, Sue Grafton and Stephen King have had. The dreams influenced their lives and their writing. In the words of Stephen King; "One of the things that I've been able to use dreams for in my stories is to show things in a symbolic way that i wouldn't want to come right out and say directly. I've always used dreams the way you'd use mirrors to look at something you couldn't see head on--the way you use a mirror to look at the hair on your back. To me that's what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are a way that people's minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language." Sue Grafton informs us; "A frightening dream is wonderful for me because it recreates all the physiology that i need in describing my private eye heroine Kinsey Millhone in a dangerous situation." Clive Barker tells us that; "My Whole Fiction is a fiction which deals with a kind of borderland between what we'll, for the sake of argument, call the real and the unreal. That is, my fiction both on the stage and later on the screen and in books is about a place where the dream life, that is so much part of our being, invades the real and actually ends up changing it." Anne Rice states; "When I was writing The Queen of the Damned, again and again I was reminded of a dream I had as a small child. In the dream I saw a woman who appeared to be made completely out of marble. She was walking on the street. I must have been five years old when I had the dream and I remember it filled me with fear.

All material Copyright 2006 International Institute for Dream Research. All rights reserved.