Dream a Little Dream

A dream, from Wikipedia

LUCY BURDETTE: The night following our last REDS AND READERS happy hour in which we discussed our early reading influences, including Nancy Drew, I had such a vivid dream in which I had written an updated Nancy Drew. I was at the book launch event, but I hadn’t prepared a thing and couldn’t remember much about the book. Reds, do you have dreams like this? What are they like?

HALLIE EPHRON: It’s an updated I-have-to-take-an-exam-but-I-haven’t-studied OR I-can’t-find-the-classroom OR… dream 😫

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Mine is turning up for a college or high school class and realizing I haven't written the paper/studied for the test. Go figure…

HANK: AND that I cannot find the room where the test is behind held, and WHY didn’t I study?

RHYS BOWEN: the dream I have is being in a play, waiting backstage and not remembering my lines ! I hunt frantically for the script but can’t find it. Sometimes I step out and deliver lines perfectly, other times I stumble through the scene not knowing what to say next.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: That's my anxiety dream as well, Rhys. My youngest, Ginger, sent me a text yesterday complaining she had had an anxiety dream about Christmas: it was the night before, and  no presents were wrapped, no stockings were hung, and no one had gotten anything for her new boyfriend.

She plaintively concluded, I thought only parents had dreams about messing up Christmas!

JENN MCKINLAY: Ha! My anxiety dream is that I’m ironing a white blouse when I realize I’m two hours late for my first day as a librarian. I’m then torn between finishing the ironing (the shirt is very wrinkled) or running out the door as is! 

JULIA: I'm laughing at Jenn's -  when was the last time any of us ironed a shirt?

JENN: Right? It's ridiculous!!!

RHYS: I also have the college class or exam dream and the Christmas one. I dream it’s Christmas Day, stores are closed and we have people coming for whom I don’t have a present Luckily I took dream psychology in college and these are all too many things on my plate dreams. We all need to slow down. 

And I have never, ever dreamed about ironing. My subconscious knows it wouldn’t happen!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Ironing, no. But for years, I did have dreams about  when the show is about to start and I don't know the lines or the steps or the words to the songs. But recently, I was in the midst of that very stressful dream, and I stopped mid-dream and said to myself, this is a dream, and of course you know the songs and the steps, and even if you don’t, you can manage just fine. And I’ve never had it again.

I am also always dreaming that I find new and gorgeous rooms in my house, filled with beautiful voluptuous things,  and I wonder—oh how did I forget about these? I love these rooms. 

JULIA: Hank, I have that same dream and I also love it. How exciting to find new rooms you didn’t know you had! What I wonder is: do people who haven't done theater have those “I’m going on and I don’t know my lines” dreams? And why, when I spent 21 years in formal education, have I never had a dream where I’m unprepared for class or know nothing about a test? 

Another one you hear of constantly in TV and movies is the alleged “appearing nude in public” dream, and not only have I never had one of these, I’ve asked friends and family, and no one I know has every had that dream. Is it just made up?

Reds, tell us about your dreams and nightmares!

And ps from Lucy, today is the official launch date for the paperback edition of THE INGREDIENTS OF HAPPINESS! Find it wherever books are sold...

Covid agitas invades our dreams

HALLIE EPHRON: Normally at this time of year I’d be zipping in and out of airports and giving workshops and talks at conferences. Willamette, Surrey, Writers Digest, Crime Bake, Bouchercon, the Piper Center at ASU, and more. My recurrent nightmare has been that I can’t find my car. I parked it… somewhere… and I’m going to be late wherever it is that I’m going.

Now I keep dreaming that I can’t find what I need in the supermarket. The whole middle of the store has gone missing and been replaced by aisles of luggage and small appliances and who knows what all stuff that I do not need.

No more dreams about lost cars. Not surprising because the only place I’m going these days is… the supermarket. In at 6:30 AM and out as fast as I can.

Meanwhile, my Stop ‘n’ Shop has taken it upon itself to completely reorganize in the store. Last time I was in there, celery, mushrooms, broccoli, scallions and cauliflower were MIA. Butter and coffee have moved halfway across the store. There's no longer a "health foods" section."

It’s as if they threw the entire store up in the air and put everything down somewhere new. Gradually. Over the course of 3 months. It takes triple time to shop.

And they're still at it. Here's what was going on in the meat department at 7 AM this morning.

In my nightmare, I dreamed that I marched up to the customer service desk and chewed out the cashier. (Something which I would never do. I adore the staff at my local Stop ‘n’ Shop.) My husband woke me up because I was shouting.

When I realized what I’d been dreaming, I cracked up laughing. So absurd. But really, my path through the supermarket is one of precious few things that were predictable in an otherwise-gone-bonkers world.

Have your dreams changed since Covid? Are new everyday challenges giving you agitas these days?

LUCY BURDETTE: I haven’t noticed the dreams so much, but waking hours definitely are affected.

We have decided to head south--we have a careful plan about staying with relatives who have bedrooms in their basement and will accept cats and puppies. And I’m planning all our road food.

But John has banned me from buying any more masks. My latest are from Everbrand. They fit really well and don’t fog up my glasses and have some kind of silver treatment on them that’s supposed to kill viruses. (Who knows right?)

So that’s how I’m channeling my anxiety--about everything!

RHYS BOWEN: My dreams have not become disturbing on the whole but very vivid and complicated. The only worrying feature is

that I dream we are keeping a lion or tiger as a pet I’m not happy about it as I realize the danger.

Having studied dream psychology at university I interpret this as having something that could be dangerous in my house with me— the virus. We don’t know where it is so we don’t feel safe.

Oh, and I realize that I am on a lot of trains, a mode of transport that I rarely use. Is my brain saying that flying is unsafe? Am i trying to get somewhere where I’ll be safe?

JENN McKINLAY: I don’t dream. I also don’t sleep. A good night’s rest for me, is five to six hours uninterrupted, but with teenagers and pets that rarely happens. I think that I’m so exhausted by the time I go to bed I’m too weary to remember anything my unconscious is throwing at me, which during these very trying days is probably a blessing.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, I have been having terrible dreams. Not every night, but some nights. My dreams are insidious, in that they always start out like very normal life, everyone doing something that they'd ordinarily be doing, and then at some point there's something off--WAIT, I used to know where the door was, or did they change the time of this event, or why can't I find the right building, or what happened to my suitcase, or where did all my clothes go? they used to be in the closet RIGHT HERE and why why why didn't I plan for whatever it is?

I'm always trying to fix things, and as soon as I figure something out, something else goes wrong.

Recently, there's been a scary black-dressed thing

--and I don't mean a person exactly, just a scary thing--at the end of our driveway, which is scaring me just to think about it. I suppose THAT representation is pretty obvious, right? Not so tough to interpret.

And hey, by the way, brain, I don't need dreams to tell me it's scary out there.

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I've been having very vivid and disrupted dreams, too, and a lot of them seem to be about looking for things. In one the other night, I was going through drawers, and in one of them was a very silky black cat, with bright green eyes. Not a stuffed cat, either, a real live cat! In my dream I could feel the texture of its fur. So weird.

I don't have a superstitious thing about black cats, having had several over the years, but it was just...weird.

My Covid agitas is more evident in the daytime, with horrible problems concentrating, and I keep feeling like I have to remind myself to breathe. A walk helps.

HALLIE: Has covid invaded your dreamscape? Please, tell us about it...

Perchance to Dream

RHYS BOWEN:Unless you are like Lucy in Key West, the rest of us are suffering from a large dose of winter! Here in California it is raining and raining and blowing. It's dark and gloomy and all I'd like to do is crawl into bed and hibernate until spring!

However,one of the annoyances of my life these days is that I have trouble sleeping. I find I have a really narrow window of opportunity to fall asleep and it's right around ten o'clock. If I don't take advantage of it and fall asleep then, if I dare to stay awake to watch the rest of a show on TV, then I am still staring at the clock at 2 a:m.

And when I'm on deadline, when I'm stressed, when I'm about to take a trip I can fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night muttering to myself "Wait. She would never have said that!" and there I am, re-writing the chapter in my head. Or I wake having had a nightmare in which the flight is due to leave and I haven't packed my clothes or I don't know where the airport is. And then there I am, staring at the ceiling until it's dawn. I've tried hot milk, melatonin, lavender, and various other natural remedies and nothing works. Ambien works fine but I keep that for when I have crossed time zones and really need a good night's sleep. Advil PM works too, but I'm against taking any drug too frequently.

So is this something you suffer from, darling Reds? And do you have any solutions that work for you and might work for me? Please share.

HALLIE EPHRON: I love to sleep, and it's the opposite for me. If I got to sleep too early, I'm up at 2 or 3 or 4 and it takes hours to fall back to sleep, and yes I'm herding all the anxieties of the day in my head. Packing dreams? Oh boy do I have them.

I'm afraid of sleeping pills. I know too many people who are hooked on them and they make it hard to wake up.

I try not not to drink too much wine at dinner. Two glasses and I fall right to sleep and wake up two hours later. My friend Pat puts on a headset and listens to audio (never music, never a page turner), something marginally engaging but somewhat boring. I do counting things... like trying to remember all the kids in my elementary school. Or all my teachers. Or I wander around my high school in my head -- down corridors, up and down staircases, in and out exits.

RHYS: That would be a nightmare for me, Hallie. I'd be terrified I'd bump into my headmistress. Boy, was she scary and I once knocked her downstairs (not on purpose, of course)

LUCY BURDETTE: I am not a good sleeper, though I was a champion in my youth. I need to try to get to bed reading by 9, and then lights out by 10 or I suffer. I'm rarely able to nap, and I can't sleep in cars or on planes. It doesn't help to have John and Tonka snoring on either side of me (John's in bed, Tonka is not), but they are my beloved peeps so I can't change that. And the cat is an early bird and quite insistent about the rest of us getting up when he wants breakfast!

As for dreams, both John and I have what we call "sh*t" dreams. What can I say? Poop everywhere--ridiculous! And like Rhys, if I'm getting close to the end of a book, ideas start coming in the night. If I don't get up and write them down, they are gone in the am. Maybe it was only gibberish, but it feels like an awful loss...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I don't sleep well, either. I have had restless movement syndrome since I was a kid--I've had all the clinical sleep trials, etc. (Talk about NOT fun.) So for me medication has been a godsend. I take a very low dose (comparatively) of a drug that is given to Parkinson's sufferers, and I do take Ambien sometimes but try to reserve that for really bad nights or across time zone travel. Still, I have a window (mine is about midnight) and if I don't go to sleep then, I am miserably awake until the wee hours. And it's so frustrating when you get those book ideas just when you're drifting off, and you know you have to write them down, but you also know that if you do then you're probably not going to sleep for a couple of hours!

Lucy, poop dreams! That cracks me up!

INGRID THOFT: Oh, sleep, how I love you.  I tend to be a good sleeper.  Some might argue I'm too good at it; in an ideal world, I could sleep nine or ten hours a night!  I tend to go to bed around the same time every night, but do allow myself to sleep in on weekends.  I always hear that elderly people sleep much less.  That should put me around the seven hour mark--a normal amount of sleep for most people--when I'm old and gray.  We always have on a sound soother that plays gentle ocean sounds.  It helps to soften noise from the sirens and trucks in our downtown setting.

I do sleep poorly on occasion, but never for more than a few nights.  I can relate to Hallie's packing dreams.  I have those in spades with all kinds of nifty variations.  It's almost like a writing prompt: You have a small suitcase, a room full of stuff, and the clock is ticking.  What happens next?

HALLIE: And where are the children?! That's always the question in mine.

JENN: Ah, sleep. It's lovely, although I only clock in about five or six hours per night. That seems to be all I need and I can't make myself sleep any longer. I go to bed about midnight, and it's like hitting a light switch. Snap. I am out. I don't dream, well, maybe once a year and then it's a weird recurring dream where I'm ironing an outfit for my first day of work at the library and I'm freaking out because I'm already late, yet I can't stop ironing. I don't wear clothes that require ironing, generally speaking. So, weird, right? I'm also a very deep sleeper. The only thing that wakes me is a sniffle or a cough from my sons' rooms. Otherwise, thunderstorms can roll, neighbors can have loud parties, etc. I sleep through all of it. Okay, right now, I'm a little tired. Oh, and I do take the occasional power nap. Fifteen minutes of being completely out and I'm good to go!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I get in bed, and wham: Asleep. I love to sleep. LOVE. I dream all the time, very elaborate colorful and  complicated, and sometimes blazingly hit you over the head obvious with their not-so-hidden meaning. Like:  had a dream where I was shown my new "house." At the entrance, I was so disappointed, it was not--pretty. But as I went deeper and deeper into the house, it got more and more wonderful, until the last rooms which were fantastic. I said to the person (Who?) "Oh, this is much better. This should be the first room you see."  And the person (who? no idea) said "No--you have to go on the journey to get to the good part."
DUH.
 But as for sleep inducers--if I ever have trouble drifting off, I try to think about being somewhere. LIke on an island, watching the birds fly over. Just watching the birds, then another one, then another one. Just...flying. OR I have an imaginary conversation with someone. If I say this, what will she say? And then what will I say? (Maybe that's SO boring that I just fall asleep.  :-) )  Or-- try thinking about--floating. Just floating.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I had a lot of trouble sleeping when I was going through menopause, but now I'm post-, I do pretty well. My problems are mostly environmental - Ross snores AND has restless leg syndrome (Debs, he's finally seeing a doctor about it! I'm hoping medication will help him, too.) The dog snores - lightly - and we have a drip in the bathroom faucet that we haven't gotten fixed (because it will involve tearing out the whole WWII era plumbing.)

So I lie in bed at night listening to the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore: SNORT! snore Twitch drip SNORT! snore Twitch drip..

RHYS: How about the rest of you? Do you find it hard to sleep? Any suggestions for someone like me who was woken by the storm at four this morning and could never get back to sleep?

The Meaning of Dreams

RHYS: Do you dream? Well, of course they say that everyone does. But do you remember your dreams? My husband doesn't and swears he doesn't dream. But I've always had particularly vivid dreams--some scary and some spectacular as in the days when I dreamed I was flying.
In the old days dreams were seen as portends--remember good old Joseph and the seven fat cows and seven thin cows?

It was only recently with Freud and the advent of modern psychology that it was realized that dreams are a portal to the subconscious mind. I took a course on dream psychology when I was at university and I was absolutely hooked. Of course Freud saw all dream symbols as related to sex but more modern thought has found that there are universal dream symbols all over the world. Appearing naked in public, being in a runaway vehicle, being chased by a monster are common to all humans.  Also symbols like the house. If you dream you are in a house, that house often represents you and how you view yourself.  If it's a palace, you think well of yourself. If it has dark rooms you don't want to go into, there are parts of yourself you are afraid to reveal.

Of course we also have dreams where the mind is in freefall and images are just random and silly but in the earlier part of the night we will have our significant dreams. If they are recurring, it's good to analyze them. Some are obvious like my recurring dream of having to pack too many suitcases in a rush or miss my flight. I've been in a car that runs backward down a hill. I've been standing in the wings ready to go onstage and realize I don't know my lines.  All famliar?

If you can't make out what the dream is telling you, write it down or tell it to someone else. Usually you will use language that explains the dream. Example: an English friend told me she has this recurring dream about being in Marks and Spencer's (the department store) and wanting to buy things but it's almost closing time and the racks are almost empty. I told her that was easy to solve by the words she chose. She had told me she wanted to go to art college but her father wouldn't let her. Now she was considering going back to art school. But had she left it too late?  It clue was that she was in a place where you get MARKS (the English word for grades)  Fun, huh?

This fascination with dreams led to my new Molly book, THE EDGE OF DREAMS, that came out last week. The story hinges on Freud's recently published Interpretation of Dreams being able to help solve a baffling crime with a young girl who survived a fire, remembers nothing, but is plagued by vivid nightmares. If they unlock the symbols in her dream they will know what happened.

So fellow reds and readers do you have recurring dreams? Have you be able to unlock their meaning?

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh Rhys, that is completely fascinating. What a splendid premise.

I dream that I'm packing and I can't possibly get everything packed in time and get to the bus station or train station or airport. No mystery what that's about. Anxiety. I also have yard sale dreams. Those I love. No idea what they mean.

RHYS: I have the same packing dream, Hallie. But yard sale? Could that mean that you're doubting the value of what you have to offer? Are your books good enough or perhaps a hidden gem? Or could it be that your husband LOVES yard sales so the topic comes up frequently?

LUCY BURDETTE: I can't wait to read this Freud book, Rhys. As a psychologist, I KNOW that dreams are important. I can recall many moments (as both a patient and a therapist) when a dream unlocked the door to understanding and clearing away a knotty problem.

The most frequently recurring dream I have these days is expecting guests and spending what seems like hours trying to figure out where they could all possibly stay. I don't suppose that has to do with living in Key West during a winter that was awful for so many others?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I used to have the ready to go on stage and don't know lines dream. Then one night, in the dream, I said -"This is a DREAM. So I'm not worried. And anyway, I DO know the lines. Well enough, at least."  Never had it again.
I do still dream I can't get somewhere, and can't figure out why. Last night I dreamed there were lots of spiders and we had to wear plastic suits to protect ourselves. (Lucy, Rhys, anything?)
  My favorite is my house dream. I have it all the time. I'm in my own house, but it's not my current house, or any real house, but it's absolutely mine, and there's a door in the back of my closet (not to Narnia) which I ALWAYS forget about. I go through it, and there's a whole room of beautiful  wonderful stuff, all in narrow mahogany drawers, like map drawers. Scarves, and shawls, velvets, and paisley wools, and pearls, all beautiful wonderful things. I think--why do I always forget this is here? And I am so happy! Sometimes, in the morning, I groggily think I should go look for it. It is incredibly real.
But then, so were the spiders.
(And I am reading your wonderful book right now!)

RHYS: Not sure about the spiders. I think we all have our monster/creepy things dreams but you're obviously good at protecting yourself with the plastic suit. I'd just have run away screaming. But the house....you are quite content with the person you are. Fulfilled. Excellent.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I have the house dream, too, Hank, and if I recall aright, Lucy told us that meant a sense of many possibilities. Either that, or we want to move...  I often have dreams where I'm about to get information I need from someone, or from a book, and then I wake up and am incredibly frustrated that I can't recall what the answer was.

RHYS: I was taught that the house means our perception of ourselves.

JULIA: You know who has interesting dreams? Ross. He has these action-adventure dreams that sound, when he recounts them, like a Bruce Willis movie. I'll hear him making noises and twitching, and wake him to discover I just saved him from a pit of crocodiles he had to cross to rescue his captured platoon. Not even lying.  It's too bad he has no facility for fiction - clearly he has the imagination to be another Clive Cussler.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have house dreams, too! I will be in a house that is nothing like anywhere I've ever lived or any house I've seen, but I know it's MY house. I'm always going into new rooms and finding new things. These dreams are so vivid that I feel shocked when I wake up and it's not real. I would suspect that my subconscious is telling me I have interesting and unexpected things left to discover--tailor-made for a writer:-)

Julia, Rick has the same kind of action/adventure dreams. He said they almost never contain anyone he knows, and that it's like watching a movie. Wonder if it's a male/female thing?

RHYS: So please share your interesting dreams with us--recurring dreams, dreams you've been able to interpret and dreams you've never managed to figure out. I'm going to give a copy of THE EDGE OF DREAMS to the most interesting comment of the day!