Wednesday 7 May 2014

Dream State

It was one of those mornings. My alarm clock went off earlier than I remembered setting it, and I had the very rare feeling of being fully rested. Not one child had slid in beside me in the night and kicked me black and blue, or honked my nose, or huffed and puffed into the spare pillow. I felt awake and ready to face the day...and then I'm not sure what happened, except it involved a vivid dream and waking up to find we were now running seriously late.

Anyway, I've had chance to write the dream down now. It's not something that's figured highly in my creative process before, and I may never use what I scribbled down at lunchtime, but I had a definite sense throughout the dream that I was actually within a story. That sense is so strong that I will have to check that what I dreamed isn't some residual childhood memory of a book I once read.

The dream was only one scene, which posed many questions and could go in several directions, but the strangest thing for me was that the main character in it was a teenage girl. The story that would rise from it would have to be YA, not a genre I've ever written, nor been interested in.

So, who knows? Perhaps I'll one day revisit that page of my notebook and wonder why a dream struck me so forcefully. Or perhaps when my next couple of works are sorted, I'll find that I want to try my hand at that one...I'll let you know!

2 comments:

  1. Sounds fascinating! (And great to have such a nice night of sleep.) Just because your protagonist is a teenager doesn't mean it has to be YA (though it obvs could). If the voice is mature enough or with an omniscient narrator, or flashes of her adult life, could all work. That said, some YA is so mature it reads like adult fiction and could be mistaken for it.
    -Dana

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  2. Thanks Dana. Am just about to hop over to your blog to enjoy your latest post...

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