Can Lucid Dreaming Make You a Better Writer? by Alexia Wdowski
Most people, with a bit of effort and attention, can have a lucid dream, perhaps even me. For the record I am not someone who has ever had a lucid dream. instead, I am someone who isn’t even sure lucid dreaming is possible although I love to dream and often remember many of them clearly. However, one blue dreamless morning an email landed into my inbox, titled, ‘Looking for Writers to Learn how to Lucid Dream,’ and on that particular Monday, I was intrigued enough to answer.
The email was from Laura Roklicer, a writer and a PhD candidate in Psychology and Creative Writing from Swansea University. She was researching lucid dreaming and creative writing, specifically short story writing, and I agreed to take part in her project to learn how to lucid dream, along with 50 other unsuspecting writers.
For anyone who is unaware of the term, lucid dreaming is where you become conscious that you are dreaming while you are still asleep. People who lucid dream can influence and interact with their dream worlds with as much agency as if they are in reality. For writers, wanting to use lucid dreaming to help with creative work, this might include inviting characters into your dreams, exploring the setting of your novel, or asking writer mentors for advice. All without leaving the comfort of your pillow. There are many well-documented ways to learn how to trigger lucidity (it is also useful for night terrors, problem-solving, learning and all kind of creativity). Laura showed us a variety of different techniques including dream diaries, setting intentions before sleeping, waking up at odd times of the morning and returning to sleep, and most importantly, reality checks.
A reality check is asking, ‘Am I dreaming?’ at regular intervals during the day, in the hope of eventually doing the same thing in a dream. This moment of realisation, ‘Wow, yes, I am dreaming right now.’ Is the gateway to lucidity, and from it follow all kinds of night-time adventures.
To check my reality now I look at my hands, they don’t have fur, or flippers, or six fingers. They rest on my laptop keys, behaving exactly as they always do. I am typing, not dreaming. Such is life.
In Laura’s project, around half the writers who completed the eight week course got a lucid dream. Some even had lots, others achieving varying stages of lucidity and awareness of their dreams. Some writers had never had a lucid dream (me), some had not had them since childhood (we often have lucid dreams as children before growing out of them as adults) and others had experienced periods of regular lucid dreaming and wanted to find out more about how to use them in their writing.
American journalist and author, Elizabeth Gilbert describes creativity as, ‘The strange partnership between a human being’s labour and the mystery of inspiration.’ Bulgarian Writer Maria Popova called creativity, ‘The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected, and meld existing knowledge into new insight.’ Dreams are an especially fertile ground for these moments of inspired connection. When taking part in the project, Writer and Artist Mark Salter dreamt he was threatened by a man in a Matrix-style coat brandishing a snapping turtle. He used this idea in a short story where a man holds up a post office with a crocodile.
He said, ‘Writing this story from my dream felt brilliant and I never would have had such a strange idea come to me otherwise.’
As Dr Clare Johnson, a pioneer of lucid dreaming research in the UK, said in one of her books, The Art of Lucid Dreaming, ‘In lucid dreams, we wake up inside this hyper-realistic, naturally creative environment and can guide this creative source to help us in specific ways.’
For writers, dreams, whether fully lucid or not, can be used to meet characters and writing ‘mentors,’ some more playful and unexpected than others. Writer and Artist Dawn Morgan went into the project wanting to meet JR Tolkien in a dream. She met Spike Milligan. As a result she woke up thinking that maybe she could lay aside the burden of her Lit Fic novel and try writing something new. She has kept her dark themes, but her dream meeting with Spike completely lightened the tone of her writing.
Laura Roklicer, who taught herself to lucid dream whilst studying Psychology, described a lucid dream where she asked to meet her protagonist. She became lucid on beautiful white sand and watched a queue of elderly men take turns to tell their life story to the ocean. Each story was full of wisdom and a lifetime of experience. But each story was not quite right. Lastly, a ten-year-old boy appeared. He spoke and she saw he had the most to tell her, more than everyone that came before him. She had found her protagonist.
Both Laura and Mark said that to recognise the dream as a potential story they also needed to use their skill as writers. It is not enough to write down your dreams as they come to you without a good edit. Learning how to lucid dream is not a short-cut for learning the craft of writing. As Allan Gurgannus said in Naomi Epel’s book, Writers Dreaming (1994), ‘People need maps to your dreams.’
It is how we draw out ideas from dreams and then use our skills as writers to knit and mould them into stories which is our real creativity. And this can happen in as many different ways as there are writers and dreamers. There is also a richness created by the interaction between our sleeping and waking lives that fuels creative productivity, whatever type of writer you are.
For me, as I read back through my dream diaries, I started to recognise repeating symbols and situations cropping up again in my dreams that found their way into my writing, crumbling rocks, family, cliff faces, a wedding, gardens, parks, flowers, trees, vines.
For writer, poet and mentor, Dr Beverley Morris, learning to lucid dream had a different effect to what she was expecting. It gave her a more effective way to look at her existing writing. As well as freeing her up to become playful and poetical in her more ‘direct’ writing, she was able to use emotions experienced in dreams. She accessed unsettling feelings of desperation and fear when she needed to write about a soldier’s traumatic childhood. Taking part in the project also helped with her editing, traditionally a more logical ‘right-brain’ activity. She found that she could now see exactly where her writing was dull, or where she was overusing exposition.
After finishing the project I moved my sleep diary away and stopped doing reality checks without ever experiencing my own lucid dream. I was disappointed but decided the act of paying attention to my dreams had been enough of a creative reward, and that maybe I was one of those people who wouldn’t ever be able to lucid dream. I decided to write this article instead, but despite my decision to stop trying to lucid dream, after a couple of months I returned to doing my reality checks (do my hands have fish scales? Nope).
In our lucid dreaming WhatsApp group (yes we have one of those) it is always somebody else who announces, ‘I had a lucid dream.’ Except during one complicated dawn it happened to me. Five months after I started the research project, I started to lucid dream. It was during a period of restless sleeping, where I was awake constantly in the night and unable to be nourished by sleep. One night, amid patchy sleep, I dreamt I was facing a blonde woman. I could see her strong, even features clearly in front of me. She turned her head around and I saw the back of her long straight hair. When she turned towards me her face had changed. Her nose was smaller, her lips wider and her blue eyes were a deep brown. I thought, ‘Aha, you can’t fool me, this isn’t reality, this is a dream!’ I woke instantly, feeling like I was so close to lucidity I could touch it.
The next night I left the heat and stuffiness of the bed at about 5 or 6 in the morning and slept alone in our tiny spare room, throwing clothes off the narrow bed, rustling around in heavy patchwork quilts and old sheets, my head up against the boiler. I was awake and asleep at the same time and restless and dreaming. I was dreaming. I was surrounded by dust, like the beginning of space. All around me was darkness. Specks of dust and rock were floating towards me. The dust began to change into brilliant gemstones and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a dream.’ The gemstones glowed and changed again and were flying towards me faster and faster, morphing into dark pieces of rock, then insects and bugs with hard shells and I was fully aware of all of this, like it was my real life, like I was experiencing it entirely, brimming with consciousness. It was almost too much, the intensity of the dark and the gross insects that were moving faster and faster towards me, their legs and bodies bent and spinning. I started to panic until I reminded myself that I was dreaming. Its okay, I am dreaming. I realised I didn’t like this dream and I could just wake up.
I woke again but not for long. I closed my eyes and fell instantly into another lucid dream. I stood in a vast field full of rippling grass thinking, ‘I am lucid dreaming again, what do I want to do now?’ I ran through all the options Laura had given us. And then I thought, well they definitely are options, but actually, I think I just want to fly.
And I’m in the air and the fields become a tiny patchwork of hedgerows and what I really want right now is to be riding a horse through this cloud-spun sky. A stallion appeared below me, black mane flowing, hooves beating the wind and I tried to pull myself on and kept slipping off. When I finally mounted, gripping the mane with both hands and heaving my legs astride, we galloped through the clouds fast like a streak of fear racing through a body.
On rainy Mondays sometimes I remember that horse and that ride and what my inner world is capable of as I move through my day to day life, sleeping and waking and working and drinking coffee. Making creative decisions and eating dinner with the rain drumming down, knowing that always somewhere inside me the heat of a black horse gallops, streaking toward the sun.
