6 Ways Dreams Inspire

The last post concerned how Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had a memorable vampire dream that she developed into the best-selling book.

How else can dreams inspire? Here are six ways:

1. A dream tutor or mentor gives direct instructions on how to do something. Imagine if you could call on Coco Chanel to resolve a tricky sleeve issue, or President Lincoln for coaching on your oratory.

2. The dreamer strolls around a personal dream gallery or library, fixing on one outstanding work to bring into waking life.

3. The dreamer recreates the script or story that is dictated in the dream. The dream story that grew into Twilight is certainly not the first of these occurrences.

4. A model or subject appears in the dream to be represented in an art form or design. In Deirdre Barrett's Committee of Sleep, a sculptor was commissioned to create a sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt. According to Barrett's narration, Eleanor Roosevelt appeared to the sculptor in a dream - but to the scuptor, it wasn't the pleasant experience of being handed a likeness on a silver platter, rather, the dream embodied a sense of overwhelm and forced her to "look at reality in a manner I don't ordinarily."

5. A dream image, either central and numinous or incidental, suggests a solution. The classic example of this is the dream that inspired Elias Howe, of sewing machine fame, to move the eye to the tip of the needle. In the dream, he was captured by cannibals who put him into a pot of water to cook him and kept pushing him back into the pot with their spears. Thing is, each spear had a hole through it, like a big sewing needle, but near the head rather than the tail.

6. In the dream, the dreamer takes a different point of view, which allows a difficult or blocked story or project to come forth more readily. For instance, an adult dreamer can take on the voice of a child, or a dreaming man becomes a little girl (As with Stephen King).