MEDIUM: Making Dreams with Fiction

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Writer, researcher and workshop facilitator on the subject of sleep, dream culture and practice.

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Novel Dream-making

Read a novel if you want good dreams. It is such a simple and pleasurable exercise, but it fires up the powers of imagination and helps develop visual imaging ability and it is really an unrivalled technique for cultivating a rich dream life. Neuroscientists have proven that neural pathways form when we read a novel, as we actively imagine ourselves in a new world.

SHORT AND LONG TERM EFFECTS OF NOVEL READING

One of my best tips for dream-making is reading novels, and surrealist, magical-realist, fantasy, sci-fi, dream-like novels are the best I think.

My earliest literary dream inspiration was probably Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This hypnagogic quest for meaning in an unravelling nonsense dream world became like a memory-map upon which my own dream realm designed itself.

Alice and her world morph in and outside of one another and Carroll’s tale totally captures the experience of dream consciousness, with moments of lucidity and moments of utter surrender to non-existent dream logic.

When Alice tries to remember herself, she becomes more conscious of the dream she is in and she taught me a lot about dream journeys and questioning. If you are always questioning are you more likely to become lucid during sleep?

My next literary dream inspiration was JG Ballard. My love of dream worlds was well established by the time I found a copy of “The Unlimited Dream Company” in a hidden corner of Sutton Library. I was just a kid, but I had a taste for surrealist art and JG Ballard novels most often feature art of this genre, as he was a keen collector of the stuff. I loved it, it was weird and erotic and gross and exotic. Like dream reality it blended the mundane with the supernatural. I read everything of his I could get my hands on.

I thought I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid — but when I went to drama school I realised that actually I just liked pretending and imagining. I went to a little drama club in Croydon at the Warehouse Theatre and I made friends with some posh kids and one of them told me to read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

It’s hard to find the perfect cover for Lolita, but if I were the cover designer I would go with my favourite line: “the question mark of a hair inside” and photograph a single pube in a pink bath tub. To me this sentence sums up the divine visual, symbolic and poetic wordplay style Nabokov employs and it communicates something of the puns and wordplay we find in dreams.

Nabokov himself recognised the problem with the cover art and said:

I want pure colours, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.

When I think of Lolita — it’s true that the persisting image is the road, the cars, the American motel culture, cozy cabins, bribery, deception, anonymity and the mercurial nature of reality and identity. The further Humbert Humbert takes his muse away from her home, the deeper and deeper he gets into illusion. There is no escape from yourself. Dreams are often journeys, they often involve modes of transport, thwarted attempts to get somewhere or find something. Lolita does a great job of psycho-analysing reality and illuminating the symbols and ghosts that haunt our lives.

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Sarah Janes