Another possible source for creative writing is from dreams. When I was in undergrad at Vassar College, I took a class on dreams and dreaming. It was an enlightening class that taught me a technique, one of many, I'm sure, for translating dreams. I often use it with my friends to this day. Step one is to start a dream journal. If you record your dreams, your subconscious is a lot more likely to let you remember more dreams. This generally works for me. Once you have a dream you find fascinating and that feels significant, you can take apart the dream for meaning. You can look at each symbol--each person, each item, each word, each emotion--and look at them in relation to each other and your life. If you're frustrated at your inability to learn something in college, that may come out as frustration with a magic talking pen, frustration with an ogre you know is your roommate, or something like that. If you're scared of something new, that may come out as something you're scared of in your life. When I was going through stress and fear as a child, I often dreamed of spiders, which symbolized fear for me. Spiders rarely appear in my dreams anymore since I no longer fear them like I once did.
For Instance:
You can go look up symbols in one of many dream dictionaries, but in my experience and according to that class, a symbol in a dream is a personal thing. There are cases where these dream journals apply but many cases where they don't. One can look up meanings suggested by such journals and then figure out if that interpretation is right in a given situation or not. If not, this method can perhaps suggest to the mind ideas about where to go from there. A pop tart in my dream may symbolize a treasure hidden in something bland, a boring obstacle I need to work through in order to discover something sweet. If I hated Pop Tarts, it may symbolize something nasty, some trial I would have to go through. Meanwhile, a friend of mine had a dream of a Pop Tart wherein she kept trying to toast it in the toaster where she thought it ought to be, but it wouldn't work. Then she tried nuking it in the microwave and it did work. When I walked her through the emotions in her dream, how she felt about the situation, she realized she was the Pop Tart. She was trying to make her current situation work, and it wasn't working. She realized if she went home and tried something else, it may work better. That dream became part of her decision making about a life change. The best person to translate a dream is the dreamer because they would understand what the symbols mean to them. It's also best to translate within a week, so the symbols still mean the same thing.
Literal Dream Use in Writing:
I have often turned dreams into short stories or used them as a spring board for a scene or character in a book. Sometimes, it's after I have taken apart the dream and figured out what it meant for me. Sometimes, it's after I lay in bed post-dream, in daydreaming mode, and transform the dream into story that makes narrative sense. I dreamed once that I was a child prince who was challenged by a dragon to participate in a contest. He was looking for someone special, so he had several kids throw plastic utensils at a wall to see if they could get it to stick in the wall. Several other kids tried and failed. When I threw the plastic fork, he threw a dagger at the same time, and the dagger stuck the knife into the wall. I turned that into a scene in a fantasy novel I wrote in high school, without the plastic knife, about a little abused boy saved from his miserable family life by a dragon who discovered his true worth. I am in good company when I use dreams in this fashion. According to many sources, Jo Rowling's original creation of Harry Potter came through visions and dreams.
I did not then understand how to translate dreams, but I was still able to use the dream in a story. It's hard to know this far removed what the parts of the dream meant to me at the time, nor can I recall many of the emotions surrounding it. If I used a Freudian dream interpretation, chances are the dream would come out sounding sexual, even if it meant nothing of the sort to me at the time.
I have heard that everyone in a dream somehow represents the dreamer. I can sometimes learn something different from a dream, interpreting it both ways, with me-as-everyone and with people in the dream representing relationships or people in my life. If I had to guess, on a figures-in-dreams-represent-others level that the dragon was something intimidating, possibly high school or a teacher. I clearly felt isolated from the other kids in my dream, as I did in high school. But I also felt special, like I was, perhaps with the help of someone intimidating [a teacher?], able to overcome a challenge that others were not able to overcome. If I translated the dream in the me-as-everyone way, I would say that the dragon was my sense of responsibility to be perfect in school, which intimidated me. However, because of the help of my own perfectionism, I found a way to overcome challenges. Both meanings work.
Symbolic Dream Use in Writing:
I used the events in the dream on a literal level when I was in high school to write a story about a dragon and a little boy. That is one possible use. On the other hand, if I use my translation of the dream, I can broaden and deepen the meaning. For instance, I could write a story about a young person, possibly male, who feels isolated from his peers because of some unique ability or disability. He has a lively fantasy life wherein those around him become dragons, fairies, or monsters in his imagination. One particular "dragon," a teacher he finds scary, gives him an intimidating challenge that at first scares him but then allows him to shine with the help of the teacher. That story could be written as a children's story, a short story, or a piece of a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, wherein this was a formative event in his life.
In other words, dreams can be used on at least two levels, literal and figurative. If we concentrate on the literal level, we can write a story inspired by events of the dream. If we use them on a figurative level, we seek the meanings and emotions behind them, inspired by our own experiences, to give them a deeper meaning. I could still use the dragon as a dragon, for instance, but also use him as a symbol for intimidating people in a child's life who turn out okay. Our dreams can inspire us to a more exciting and sometimes more profound level of writing than we might if we're limited to our own waking consciousness.
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