Life Writing, Dreams and Personal Growth
The Lizard that Did Yoga -or- Creative Writing
Early on in my note books, I began to understand that dreams provided a literary foundation for "life writing", which in-turn facilitated "personal growth" or what Jung called the "individuation" process. One of the earliest English autobiographies by a woman that included dreams, was that of the mystic Margery Kempe "The Book of Margery Kempe". Saint Bridget of Sweden "Revelationes", which also included spiritual dreams dating back to her childhood, reportedly had an influence on Kempe.
From a somewhat more secular perspective Robin Hemley "Turning Life into Fiction", tells his readers; "Dreams almost always involve metaphor, simile, and symbol. Writing a dream story is almost the opposite of writing other kinds of stories. The dream is already your real life transformed, an interpretation of sorts, so your task is to retransform it into real life--to make it seem real." When Robin was eleven he had a dream that his "mother wrote a short story about a lizard that did yoga". He told his mother the dream and she did in fact write the story and it became part of an anthology of the "best stories from the Southern Review."
Other dream interpretations such as;
underscore the uses of the dream as an autobiographical document, for the purpose of life and creative writing.