One of the most vivid dreams I ever had was…

Me listening to my daughters tell a combined imaginary tale about knights, dragons and monsters in a mystical land, and I was trying to transcribe this hectic, self referential logic nightmare of a tale as they spoke it out loud in tandem like a vomited stream of consciousness. It was such a vivid memory, I could feel the fluctuating story ideas, like they were there breathing at my finger tips. It made almost no sense as they told it, but in my dream I was able to sort of throw it on the table to smash apart, and then take a really wide angle lens to it and rebuild it into a coherent epic fantasy novel. The best part about it was taking the whole spoken tale and sort of doing this exploded view – like you get of an engine diagram format, but being able to draw elements together, or add parts and realign story beats so that it all made sense, and flowed together. It was a wildly exciting dream, and when I woke up I remembered absolutely none of the story, but only the rush of picking it apart and putting it back together to make some kind of sense. Which sounds tedious, but also like a performance in and of itself. I’d love to revisit that dream, and actually remember the story my girls told me. If you’ve ever spent time listening to kids under six tell you stories, you know how many gaps there can be, what sort of logical leaps you need to make, and how easy it is to lose the plot. Good times. I guess I had a dream about editing. Wow! – go me. in