Dreams and writing in the middle of the night

You know how people say you should write your dreams in a journal because they tell your deepest desires, fears, etc? Well, I do write my dreams down. They're my stories. Freud and the psychology world can have a field day considering some of them!

My first published story - came from a dream that woke me up, would not let me go back to sleep until I wrote it down. At 3 o'clock in the morning! So, ever obedient, I got up, cranked up the computer and wrote the scene between Serena and Keith in his playroom. I emailed it immediately to Angela, whom I was working on something else with. I didn't remember sending it to her, but about noon the next day, before I'd had a chance to go back and tidy it up, I had a reply from her basically saying - drop the other stuff and go with this.

So, I learned - when the dreams grab hold of me, I get my butt out of bed and write. (The cats usually like this as they get breakfast much earlier.) The dialogue, the story flow, descriptions and emotions - somehow they all seem surreal, yet more real at the same time when you get up in the darkness. When things are still and the rest of the world is still asleep, the mind lets it all out and the fingers fly across the keyboard.

I'm not saying it's always written perfectly. I'm still not sure how many errors were in that first scene. But the flow is there. The thrust and passion of the story comes out and the characters speak loud and clear as my mind hasn't had time to fill up with other, more mundane things.

I didn't think I could duplicate that process in the daytime. It just seemed so special, so rare. But I found it this summer - during my June writing blitz. I learned how to take the nighttime dream phase and channel it into a focus in sunlight. Call it the muse, or a writer maturing, but the story rushed out of me non-stop and I had a hard time keeping up with it all.

And I loved every minute of it. It was a turning point for me on a couple levels. First, I realized I did have the discipline to sit down and write every day without getting caught up in the distractions of social media or computer games. Second, I'd discovered how to 'flip the switch' and channel it, work with the story and characters.

The first of the Carnal Connections series will be out soon. It's the first of many things - first in the series, first self-pub'ed, and first in a breakthrough I had as a writer. I hope you find yourself as lost in reading Sean and Jessica's story as I did in writing it.