Writers Finding Muse in Dreams
By JORDAN LITE, AP
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) - Stephen King had written about 700 pages of the novel
``It'' when he got stuck. He went to bed frustrated, thinking about what should happen
next. The answer emerged in a nightmare as scary as the horror story he was writing.
King dreamt he was the little girl in the book, trapped in a creepy dump with
discarded refrigerators that had leeches hanging inside. One flew out and sucked the blood
from the girl's hand. The dream found its way into the novel.
``I woke up and I was very frightened,'' he recalled in Naomi Epel's book,
``Writers Dreaming.'' ``But I was also very happy. Because then I knew what was
going to happen.''
A literary publicist who has listened to the dreams of countless authors, Ms.
Epel is no stranger to the mysterious messages of the unconscious. It was one of her own
dreams that inspired the 1993 book, and now she shows aspiring artists how dreams can
nurture their work.
``It's like we have the dreaming brain that thinks in images and is not linear
and then the critical brain. You have to have both,'' she explained while taking a break
at last week's annual conference of the Association for the Study of Dreams.
``Most creative people at least trust that information when it comes up,'' she
added. ``Many people don't remember their dreams every day. When a big dream happens, they
listen, they go with their process of exploration.''
William Styron listened. One morning he woke up with the image of a beautiful
young woman with concentration camp numbers tattooed on her arm carrying a book.
That very morning, Styron recalled in Ms. Epel's book, he wrote down the first
words of ``Sophie's Choice'' exactly as they appear in the novel.
But writers can do more than transcribe their dreams. The images are so powerful
that many writers, Ms. Epel found, try to get into a dreamlike state to generate new
ideas. Maya Angelou said she plays solitaire to hypnotize herself back in time.
``I don't know how this is like dreaming but it is,'' Ms. Angelou told the
author. During a writing workshop at the conference, Ms. Epel gave Ms. Angelou's use
of cards a new twist. In 50 cards Ms. Epel created to jumpstart writing, artists are
offered strategies ranging from ``change your point of view'' to ``zoom in zoom out'' -
reminiscent of Amy Tan's practice of focusing on an image that will take her into a scene
whose details gradually emerge in the writing it inspires.
Lily Myers, who attended the workshop, was impressed. ``These people have
started here, so I can too,'' said Ms. Myers, 45, of Oakland, Calif. ``I've written about
my dreams but never thought of using my dreams to write about other things. That seems
like a juicy new possibility.''
Ms. Epel, who in 1979 spent a year working in Berkeley at a now-defunct home for
schizophrenics who would interpret one another's dreams ``and all sorts of wild things
would happen,'' never imagined how far a single dream several years ago would take her.
In the dream, she was in a basement, watching a man who clearly didn't want to
be disturbed working at a table. She was quiet, so he let her stay. They didn't speak.
A fellow dream buff Ms. Epel described it to recommended that she spend some
quiet time alone. She made her way to the word processor and ``Writers Dreaming'' emerged.
``It was because of that dream that I went from dreaming of success to having
some kind of success,'' Ms. Epel said. ``It was definitely transforming.''
