Dreaming it all up.

I am blessed to have somehow discovered Dorien Grey and Me a couple of years ago.  I have kept up with that blog on and off for awhile and always come away with something.  This was a long response I decided to put on my own blog.  Thanks Roger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I have always loved my dreams, they are an integral part of me.  Since a young child I had vivid and very real dreams that often left me confused as to whether I had made it up or was seeing the future, or past life or something that could not be explained.

I had a few specific recurring dreams that faded away at one point in my life, though the setting I have often revisited.  I've had dreams that flickered like old film before me, dreams that went by like slideshows of moments that I could not tell whether real or not, far too realistic for me to accept as made up.
I've had epic dreams with intricate plots and a vast set of characters that left me almost spinning when I woke up to find myself there in my bed.
They are an escape in our mind, and an amazing example of the creativity and capability of our brain to retain information. Some dreams pull up things I never knew that I knew. For example, the other night I had a very long dream, one of those epic dreams.  We had flown to Europe, some colleagues and I - people I don't know, yet their appearance and the personal details I knew about them made them like people I have always known. Isn't it amazing how our brain does that? Or does it? I've often wondered where it comes from.  The people in our dreams often - we already know them. Yet, in our waking conscious mind, we can not place them.  Who are these people?
Anyway, back to the dream. After getting to see many cities from my childhood, as well as other cities I had never been to, we ended up in some town in Germany where I met Friedrich Nietzsche.  I do not recall in my working memory the man's face, or anything about him that I may have learned somehow at some point in my life, but the face of the man was so distinct.  I remembered it as if I had actually seen him.  When I woke up I Googled him (as I am prone to do) and was so surprised that his photograph matched perfectly and he was German, which I really didn't know.
Which makes me wonder if the other things about him would have been the same.  He had a soft way of speaking, very proper and a gentle nature, it seemed.  He was well dressed, but seemed a bit socially awkward.

I have done this so many times, dreamed of people, in particular, in such detail. The stories I write always begin in a dream, and the characters often mainly spring from that same source. When I begin to write about them something magical happens. They visit my dreams again, sometimes often.  This is a wonderful thing to me, these dynamic characters I dreamed up returning to me.

What an amazing vast ocean we have in our minds of possibility! Never ceases to amaze me.
I have so much to say about dreams. Its a subject I'll have to come back to.