Hello, I'm Dr. Flora Strangelove . . .

Recently I had one of those dreams where I couldn't remember who I was, where I was, or how I had gotten there. To compound my confusion, I dreamed that I woke up in that state. I believe the term for that kind of experience is false awakening (but I may just be making that up from my own fevered imagination). It also didn't help that people sometimes actually do wake up without any idea where they are or how they got there – the experience is common enough to lend the dream that extra element of realism (and therefore that edge of panic).

In this dream, I woke up of the hood of a car. I had no memory of going to sleep there. But oddly, I did know something: it had happened before. So instead of flipping out, I tried to take stock of the situation.

This attempt to make sense of the unknown is what lies at the heart of many dreams. The circumstances usually don't make the slightest sense, so the explanations we come up with can be quite creative. In this case, I noticed that I was in a parking lot, possibly next to an Interstate, and there was a building nearby that could have been bathrooms. A few other cars were in the lot, and some of them also had people sleeping on the hoods. Those people had blankets and pillows; once I saw that, I realized that I did too. So probably I was sleeping on my hood on purpose, rather than ending up there as the result of an accident (or a drunken misadventure).

Once I reached this conclusion, I noticed there was another critical piece of information that I had forgotten: my name. It should have been the first thing that came to mind, but it absolutely did not. When I wracked my brains for it, the name Flora bounced around like a withered peanut in its shell. So I thought maybe my name was Flora. But the name Dr. Strangelove was also knocking around in there, so by that reasoning my name must be Dr. Flora Strangelove.

And why are we all sleeping on our hoods instead of in our cars, where it's safer? I wondered. The temperature was comfortable outside, maybe that was it. But wait – if we were near an interstate, we might be far enough away from town to see the stars. So I rolled onto my back to look up and, sure enough, the Milky Way stretched across the sky in full, fabulous display. I figured this must be why I had decided to sleep on the hood: so I could enjoy this view.

As I gazed in wonder, I heard a sound that knocked my panic level up a notch: someone stirred beside me. I had company on that hood.

Slowly I turned my head to gaze at this menace. But he was asleep too, and he was in a sleeping bag. That suggested that he hadn't just snuck up on me, he belonged there. I studied his face, but didn't recognize it. Maybe if I had been looking in a mirror I wouldn't have known myself, either. As I stared at him, he pried an eye open and focused on me.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm Doctor Flora Strangelove.”

He managed to look baffled, even though he was only half awake. “Huh?' he said. “Wha – ?”

And then I woke up for real.

These half-baked little scenarios are exactly the sort of thing that get writers thinking. The human brain can't help trying to find patterns, even if no real pattern exists. The philosophy of a writer is that it doesn't matter what's real – you can make it seem real. You just have to find an interesting way to fill in the blanks. And that's why dreams like the one in which I played Dr. Flora Strangelove are more interesting than frustrating. Even if I never do much with it, I'll wonder why those two people were sleeping on the hood of that car together. Were they married? Were they private investigators (with a really small budget)?

Who else was in that parking lot . . . ?

The illustrations for these posts are from the files of Ernest Hogan. The one of the long-fingered lady at the top is the cover for my ebook, Pale Lady. Download it for free on Smashwords!

Notes From A Dreamed Life

I had an Ah-Hah moment while I was sitting in a theater watching Inception, the movie about people who are trapped in endless loops and multiple levels in a dream. Up until that point, the story had been entertaining, engrossing, thought-provoking, and just plain fun. But then one of the characters mentioned that when you enter deeper levels in a dream, time is experienced differently. In the waking world, minutes may be passing. But in this dream sub-level, years seem to be going by.

This has happened to me. Perhaps ten times in my life, I've gone to bed and experienced lifetimes before I woke up. I can't nail the number down exactly, because the sensation of having lived all those years fades within minutes upon waking. I'm left with snippets of memories from that dreamed life, lived in a dazzling universe full of wonders, terrors – and love. And I grieve for the loss, until even that sensation fades. If I'm lucky, I can salvage some of the images, events, characters, landscapes, mystical and emotional qualities, and weave them into one of my novels. So as I sat in that darkened theater, watching those characters dive deeper and deeper into a dream, I thought “Ah-hah!” This was why I became a writer. I've been trying to preserve what I can of those lost, dreamed lives.

Christopher Nolan, writer and director of Inception, may not have had the same experience with time dilation in a dream that I have, but he at least knows that such a thing is possible. I have no idea how many other people do. When I talk with others about their dreams, some common experiences come up. Some dreams seem to be meaningless jumbles of random images and sounds. Others seem like mystical conduits to the afterlife, where you can speak with loved ones who have passed away. Some dreams drive you like demons of anxiety, regret, guilt, and terror, until you feel grateful to wake up again, even though you're exhausted. Anyone who has ever been to school has had the one about forgetting to go to class and suddenly being confronted with a final exam you're not prepared to take. Not to mention the one about being naked in public.

Both of my recent novels, The Night Shifters, and Spirits Of Glory, were inspired by dreams. Not all of those dreams were the sort that seemed to last years – many of them were fairly short. And my novels aren't composed of 100% dream material – if they had a laundry label, it might read, 30% research, 20% brainstorming, 35% dream, 15% dumb luck. Every writer has a different experience with inspiration. But I wonder – how many writers have lived for years inside a dream, as I have? Is it a common experience, or rare? Or does it differ for every dreamer, just as inspiration does?

Leonardo DiCaprio's character is haunted by the dream of his lost love in Inception. Whether or not the movie has a happy ending depends on whether or not you believe it does. It all depends on how you chose to look at it. And ultimately, that's how I've come to terms with the loss of my dream lives. I lived them – the other choice is not to have known them at all. And who knows? Some day, when this current dream life is over, I may wake to find myself in another.

In the meantime, I'll write down what I remember, and hope for the best.

The Recurring Nightmares Hall Of Fame

Ask just about anyone if they have recurring nightmares, and some common themes become apparent, usually involving semi-nakedness, school classes that have somehow been missed all semester (and suddenly you're sitting at the final exam), and trying to run away from the monster when you're stuck in slow-motion speed. Most of these common nightmares aren't scary to anyone but the person who's suffering them. They range from sad, to funny, to downright baffling.

But once you veer away from the most common themes, it can be hard to tell just how individual a nightmare is. For the last 30 years, I've had three types of recurring nightmares that seem like they ought to be at least somewhat common, especially among homeowners. Nightmare 1: The Roof Has Holes I Didn't Know About. Nightmare 2: The Gerry-Rigged Plumbing Has Finally Gone Blooey. And Nightmare 3 (the genuinely scary one): The Runaway Stove. These recurring nightmares might seem straight-forward. You'd think that once I recognized them, maybe I could get myself to wake up. But they never show up by themselves. They insidiously insert themselves into other dreams, leaping out at me and shouting BOO! just as things begin to spin out of control.

Take the Leaky-Roof dream. Sometimes it shows up as part of another recurring nightmare, one in which a semi-apocalypse has descended upon the world, and I manage to make my way back to my childhood home. I dream about that house quite a lot – and I'm always glad to see it in these dreams, even under bad circumstances. I move back into the house, and that's when I begin to notice there are problems with the roof. BIG problems. They are always heralded by leaks from a rainstorm. Considering that I live in Phoenix, where it only rains a few times a year, this is rather an amazing thing. The drip, drip, drip warns me that I need to place pans and buckets under holes. And as I chase the drips, the holes get bigger, until I'm finally confronted with catastrophic gaps. You might think the sight of those storm clouds through what's left of my poor roof would fill me with despair. Instead, I feel determined to fix the problem.

Other times, the roof leaks are much more unexpected, showing up in dreams about sudden riches. I have somehow managed to get into a big, fancy house (always under bizarre circumstances that have nothing to do with obtaining any real wealth or security). As I try to puzzle through the labyrinthine circumstances that brought me to this house that I haven't earned and probably don't deserve, the leaks become apparent. Once again, they don't fill me with despair. If anything, they make sense. Ah-hah! This is why I got stuck with this house!

There's nothing positive about the dream of the Gerry-Rigged Plumbing. It resembles real life all too much. This is why it shows up just about everywhere, in any kind of dream you can think of. Have I married the handsome prince and moved to the castle? Too bad the master bathroom has a sink that never turns off completely. Am I being chased by a relentless, alien killing machine on a space station? Yeah, PLUS the toilet has filled the latrine with four inches of water. I have finally reached the conclusion that at no time in my life will every bit of plumbing in my house work exactly the way it's supposed to. That goes for the car and the appliances, too.

I feel determined, baffled, overwhelmed, and/or annoyed in most of these recurring nightmares. But one of them fills me with genuine terror. Like the Leaky Roof and the Gerry-Rigged Plumbing, the Runaway-Stove hides itself in other dreams. It may show up in one of those dreams I have about my childhood home, or in another common dream location, my grandmother's boarding house. It may show up in the home I live in now (about which I almost never dream). It may even lurk in a dark corner of the castle or the alien-haunted space station. It's a clever demon, a patient monster that cannot be stopped once it makes an appearance.

It's always an electric stove, and its mechanism is simple. Someone has turned a burner (or all of the burners) on high and left it on. The heat is so enormous, the controls have melted – and now I can't turn the damned thing off. It just gets hotter and hotter. I get the bright idea that I should run and turn off the main switch in the control box. But the stove is so hot, I can't get past it. I'm trapped in the kitchen with no way to turn it off, and it just keeps getting hotter. In the worst version of this dream, I'm trapped in an industrial kitchen with several of the runaway monsters.

The symbolism in these dreams is pretty obvious. Sometimes it's so obvious, you can't even call it symbolism. Maybe the circumstances of these recurring nightmares are individual, but the feelings behind them are still common. Living in the world is complicated. Life is challenging. We worry about stuff we can see and stuff we can't. If we're lucky, the sight of the leaky roof fills us with determination. Maybe we really can make our way home after the semi-apocalypse.

And when we do, we won't accidentally leave the stove on.