When I went to an acupuncturist, he asked me about my dreams. I told him I have lots of vivid fascinating dreams, complete with backstory, in full colour. I didn’t tell him they were sometimes stylized (if I’d been reading graphic novels) or, on rare occasions, set to music with rhyming dialogue. ( I know, weird).
He said it wasn’t normal for people to dream vividly every night. I’d thought my dreams were normal.
And perhaps they were for me.
According to David Watson, a professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, “There is a fundamental continuity between how people experience the world during the day and at night,” he said. “People who are prone to daydreaming and fantasy have less of a barrier between states of sleep and wakefulness and seem to more easily pass between them.” In other words, creative people tend to have vivid dreams. See the full article here.
Now, it seems, video game players might be able to control their dreams up to a point. Jayne Gackenbach, at Grant McEwan University has been doing research into dreams and gamers. She found that lucid dreamers and gamers tended to have better spacial skills. Both groups had a high level of concentration. According to a 2006 study, people who frequently played video games were more likely to have lucid dreams and to be aware that they were dreaming.
“A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.
The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness.” See the full article here.
I’ve been reading a book on current knowledge about plasticity of the human brain. It looks like game players have been rewiring their brains specfically for this ability. The more you do something the more this sinks into your brain and becomes second nature. So keep reading, keep day dreaming and keep dreaming. It is all tied into creativity, even if we don’t understand how or why, just yet.
I’ve used scenes from dreams as leaping off points for stories. Do you experience vivid dreams? Ever had a dream where everyone is talking in rhyme?
Just when you thought you’d seen all the permutations you possible could in the Dark Urban Fantasy genre along comes something fresh.
