Dreams of Reading

[Paul Whybrow]

I've previously posted about Creativity in Sleep, after having a nightmare engendered by writing my first Cornish Detective novel, which meant researching concentration camps. Perhaps, when I self-publish these stories, I should call my company Broken Toe Books!

Last night I read one of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels for three hours, before going to sleep. The plot is convoluted and requires a lot of concentration by the reader. I decided to use my writerly brain to work out what happens next, while I slept, but I didn't dream about it at all—which surprised me a bit.

I realised that I don't have many dreams about the books I read, but, then again, how many of our dreams are truly memorable? The last dream I recall having about a book was inspired by one of my favourite reads of 2017, Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen whose protagonist searches for lost travellers in the snowy wastes of Montana; I had a dream where I was looking for people from my past...and for ideas about my WIP!

Occasionally the thesaurus part of my grey cells offers me a better alternative to what I've written, usually when I turn over in my sleep; that I recall these fresh words in the morning amazes me...and they're always superior to what I typed in full flow.

Intrigued by this area of psychology, I did some research this morning. Apparently, actually dreaming about reading is very rare—unless you're a poet—which I am! This is because the language processing parts of the brain are located in the back and middle, which are much less active during sleep, as this fascinating article
reveals:

Can You Read In Your Dreams? Not Unless You're a Poet, Says Science | Inverse


Have any of you had vivid dreams about the books you've read?

 

[Amber]

Nope.... But I dream in color... and they're really crazy.

 

[Allan Hunter]

I often dream about books that I'm reading. My mind picks up the plot where my actual reading left off, and invents some truly fascinating new subplots and plot twists. The boyfriend detective who is second-guessing her strategy is actually working for the murderer. The real reason the dwarves have been resistant to letting the unicorns into the valley is that along with the humans and the witches, they've been humoring the unicorns all along, going along with it but not taking it seriously -- and if the unicorns poke around in the valley they'll realize that after awhile. The house elves are being cultivated by the wizards as an auxiliary source of food, but only Hermione, the newcomer to the scene, is unaware of that, whereas the others have never questioned it.