I woke up at about 4am this morning from a vivid dream. One that, hours later, I still remember. Well…sort of…

First, I’m in a huge city built on rolling hills. Massive buildings stretch toward a baby-blue sky filled with fluffy clouds. An impossible highway swoops and loops over the towers. I’m on it, in a car, or above it, watching a car, wind its way…somewhere.

Then, I’m in a cramped forested area with a pond at its center. The entire area is surrounded by cliffs that make it otherwise inaccessible. I’m alone, but I’m not. Maybe. The figures with me feel more like ideas than actual people. And I sense they’re speaking to me. Whispering about this place. Telling me we’re all heroes looking for something. It’s in the water. Right there. In front of us.

A mechanism of wood and gears and rope is suddenly beside me. And working it raises a rickety wooden path out of the water, to a small island that wasn’t there a moment before. I wobble across to claim my prize: a sword. Or is it a chest? Maybe both? I can’t quite remember.

That’s when I wake up…

The fact that I still remember this much is, frankly, amazing. Usually, my dreams are so fleeting that I can only recall that I did dream the night before. So, this dream stands out amidst the foggy uncertainty of all the others. But there’s something else about this dream that makes it unique: it’s location.

One thing that’s always stuck out about my dreams (the ones I can remember, at least) is that they typically take place in a “familiar” location; my mind tends to reuse sets when I dream. Instead of having a recurring dream, I’ll have unique stories/events taking place in a recurring location. Right now, I can only remember one of these locations: an old, rickety house that feels like it’s in the middle of some haunted woods, under a dark sky (though, I never typically can see what’s around the house; I only have a sense of what’s around it).

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a far less active dreamer. Even now, I have some vivid memories of a single, recurring nightmare that I had as a child. Of running through a parking lot (a Winn-Dixie parking lot, I think). Off of a ledge. Then, falling into wakefulness. Most of my childhood dreams were nightmares. Products of an overactive imagination squeezing all the darkness it could out of the recesses of my developing mind. Now, dreams feel like they’re not nearly as common. Sometimes, I can even go what feels like weeks without experiencing a single dream. And the vast majority of what dreams I do have are a more mellow experience. Like the one described above.

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I’m not sure there’s a concrete point to this post other than to reflect on a part of my life that’s profoundly abstract. More often than not, I’ll wake up and only have the wherewithal to say: “I had a crazy dream last night”. Yet, I rarely wake up with a vivid recollection of the dream.

For some, dreams have deep meaning. They’re interpretable. At one point, I may have said the same, back when the occasional, fleeting memory of a dream would prompt a flash of overpowering deja vu (something that hasn’t happened in years). Nowadays, I don’t have any particularly strong feeling about dreams, one way or another. Though, I do wonder what causes some to linger on the surface while others drown in the sea of the waking mind. What’s so special about these experiences? And why do they hang in memory when so many others fade to obscurity?

I definitely don’t have the answers.

What I can say is that I have used dreams in my fiction as a vehicle for memory for foreshadowing, which is far more pointed and specific than anything I’ve experienced. But looking back at my own dreams, I wonder if there’s anything I can learn about the structure of the worlds our unconscious minds put together. Could I use that to better inform my writing?

The answer to that is: definitely!

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So, now that I’ve rambled on for far too long, I turn the questions to you. Do you dream often? Do you remember your dreams? Do you think they have profound meaning or are simply an idiosyncrasy of the mind? And do you think there’s anything we can learn from our dreams?