Did you know that scientists don’t understand why we dream at night? They don’t even know how we dream, only that our sub-conscience plays a role and that dreams happen during a part of our sleep cycle called REM sleep. What purpose do dreams serve us? Is it our body training us for a fight or flight situation? Is it a message from some higher power? Is it our own mind trying to tell us something? If you go online you will find thousands of websites that will help you translate your dreams. What do you think my mind was trying to tell me when I dreamt the following?
I dreamt that I had sold an American friend of mine a pink Ford Anglia (like the one in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and that for some reason I HAD to get it back. I sat in bed, groggy, for a full ten minutes, believing I had made this horrendous mistake before remembering that not only have I never owned a Ford Anglia, I have never even owned a car!
If we know one thing about dreams, we know that they can serve as brilliant inspiration. Paul McCartney claimed he heard the melody for Yesterday in a dream and wrote it down when he woke up. Albert Einstein reportedly dreamt he was sledging down a mountain and noticed that the stars changed their appearance in relation to his movement. Some people train themselves to be lucid dreamers which means they can control some, or even all, elements of their dreams. They can literally create and manipulate worlds in their sleep!
Today I’ll be looking at five famous novels that were inspired from dreams.