Enjoying Dreams

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I am one of those lucky people that has incredibly vivid dreams. I love going to sleep and seeing what pictures and stories my mind will put together. Sadly, I don't sleep often (thank you, anxiety!), but when I do, it's the best.

Recently, I had a dream that I was Jason Momoa. In the past, I've had dreams that I was a cartoon character (that was a lot of fun) and that I can speak different languages.

As you can imagine, having good dreams is the most ideal situation, but it's not always possible. Because I have such vivid dreams, when I get stressed, my nightmares can be absolutely horrific. I'm not particularly fond of those dreams. Thankfully, I'm a lucid dreamer, so I can change my dreams if I want.

I've always had incredibly vivid dreams, and more often than not, I remember what happened in them. When I was in high school, I took a psychology class, and one of our assignments was to create a dream journal. Everyone else in the class turned in 1 or 2 pages, while I turned in 10+. I can only imagine what the teacher thought reading through my dreams.

They may be vivid, but they don't always make a whole lot of sense. As you can imagine, being dreams, they follow their own rules. The laws of physics don't get obeyed, and time is often incredibly relative. Still, while I'm in the dream, it all makes perfect sense.

I've used my dreams as inspiration to write stories. Normally, I can't use them as they occur (refer to paragraph above for reason why), but I can pull certain ideas out and expand upon them.

With the work I've been doing to lower my stress, anxiety, and depression, when I've slept, I've been able to have some incredible dreams. I love dreaming. I will try to keep track and let you know if anything of note runs through my mind.

What are your thoughts on dreams? Do you remember yours? Do you enjoy them? What is one of the craziest dreams you remember having?

A World of Possibilities in 2018

Since November 2016, my life has been challenging. I lost a job, struggled to find a new job, moved to a new state, and then once again struggled to find a new job and settle in—in addition to tons of minor bumps in the road along the way.

I finally feel like I’m in a place where life is becoming normal again. I’ve even had the energy and time to write. I’m looking forward to 2018 and have several goals I’m hoping to achieve. They are as follows:

• Get Edge of Humanity (the sequel to Humanity’s Hope) out into the world
• Publish Undead Ifs, the third book in The Ifs series
• Get some audiobooks made
• Write another novel (or more, I have several ideas in mind, so with a little luck, maybe I’ll have the chance to work on several stories during the course of the year) 

I don’t doubt that 2018 will have its share of ups and downs. There will be tough times, and there will be great times—that’s just life. However, through it all, I hope to hang on to my dreams and accomplish some goals. After all, what fun is life if you don’t have dreams?

What are some of your goals for 2018?

If I Was Braver

If I was braver, I would quit my job and completely immerse myself in writing.

It’s not that I hate my job; I don’t. I rather like the people I work with and it gives me a chance to use my degree. In fact, I get paid to write, and that’s awesome, but it’s not what I want to write; they’re assignments. Sure, I have some freedom in deciding topics, and I usually learn something new and fascinating with each assignment, but there’s also a rigidity to it.

To be able to write what I want to write when I want to write it and have it pay would be amazing. To be able to pay my bills with this type of writing would be phenomenal. At the moment, with a full-time job and a family to take care of, I squeeze writing in when I can. It’s not a terrible way to live my life, I still get my writing done, but I’m curious what I would be capable of doing if writing for enjoyment was my sole focus.

If I was braver, I would travel more, get myself out to more of the world.

In addition to throwing myself completely into writing, I would also dedicate more time to promotion. I do what I can now, as my schedule permits, but I would love to be able to do so much more. I would love to share my ideas with more people, and I would love to be inspired by their ideas and thoughts. I love doing workshops and presentations and attending conferences, and if I had time, I would do more.

If I was braver, I would spend more time helping out my fellow writers.

I love editing. It’s part of my professional expertise. I love being able to help other writers make their stories better. I also love being able to read stories that the vast majority of the world hasn’t seen yet. It’s magical.

I read articles all the time about how great authors—Piers Anthony, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling, to name a few—were willing and able to give up security to follow their dreams. I’ve read about their hardships and struggles and how they were on the verge of destitution before finally making it big, and I both envy them and question why they did it.

I’m too afraid to take that leap. I worry too much about what my kids won’t have if I give up my steady, paying job. It scares me to think we’d be living on the street and not in comfort, that we might not know where our next meal is coming from, and that stops me from taking that next step.

It frightens me to think that I will never reach the fame and notoriety that these other authors have achieved, and that it could be because I wasn’t willing to try. At the same time, I also think that the world is saturated with writers, and I am just one among many. How could I possibly hope to stand out? That thought stops me from trying.

I already make sacrifices to make achievements in my writing, and I know that it takes hard work and determination to achieve my dreams, but I always wonder what more I could accomplish if I gave up more.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I would do with my life if I wasn’t so afraid, and the thoughts are both encouraging and distressing. I am nothing without my dreams, and those help keep me moving, but there comes a point when I have to be willing and able to do more. I have to continue to push my boundaries and try new things. I may not always be successful, but I can learn from the failure.

However, I have found that there are only so many boundaries I’m willing to push. I absolutely use my fear as an excuse, and I will continue to do so. I may never find my bravery, and that scares me too.

I Have the Best Ideas When I’m Half Awake

I know I’m not the only one this happens to. I know there are several of you out there who have made this same comment before. You’re in between deep sleep and waking up, but your mind is going a mile a minute. Ideas are rushing through your head at lightning speed, and you’re doing your best to hang onto them. This happens to me, too.

Sometimes I can hang onto them, and sometimes I can’t. But one thing I noticed is that most of them aren’t as good as I thought they were when I get up. And then I’m annoyed that I couldn’t sleep.

I am not a morning person. I never have been and I probably never will be. Ask my family. They’ll tell you what a treat I am in the morning. But the crazy thing about that is that I have to get up early. Between the kids and the dogs, sleeping in is incredibly rare. And during the week days, I’m up before 5:00 am four days a week so I can work out.

Granted, the boys are getting old enough now that they can keep themselves entertained and get their own breakfasts, so I don’t have to worry about them as much. But the dogs, they’re a different story. They can’t let themselves out or get their own food.

I feel like I’m getting a little better about being up in the morning. As long as no one talks to me unless I talk to them first, we’re good. And since I know I have to be up, I pep talk myself that it’s going to be an amazing day. I try to be tolerable in the morning. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

My days start early, and I’ve tried to adapt. But some days start even earlier with my brain working overtime. I’ve gotten some great story ideas when my brain does this, but more often than not, the ideas it comes up with are terrible. They’ll be fantastic at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, but when I’m fully awake and think them through, they’re awful.

There have been a few times when I thought I had a fantastic idea for a story that portrayed itself so vividly in my brain. All the details were there, how the words will form on the page, the opening lines. Then I wake up and think about them and realize the idea was my brain re-enacting a movie I watched or another story I had read that day. That’s really disappointing.

I’ll have hilarious ideas for Tweets to post the next day, but when I wake up, they’re not so funny. In fact, some of them are just confusing, and I question my unconscious brain. Does it really have that bad of a sense of humor?

But then there are other times when it works out in my favor. Life After the Undead was created after a moment like this. Ideas for promotion have come to me in my half-awake brain. I appreciate that my mind is constantly working and helping me become better, but sometimes I wish it would do it when I was awake.

Being Brave

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and memes about being brave. They center around doing what you love and taking stress out of your life. Sometimes they talk about quitting your job or getting rid of negative people. I find them inspirational.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I was brave. One thing I would absolutely love to do is quit my day job and become a full-time writer. Technically, at my day job, I am a full-time writer, and I enjoy what I do, but I often think about how much faster I would get my books done if I donated all my time to them. I think about how much research I would be able to accomplish. I think about how much more time I would have to promote them. What scares me is that I wouldn’t have the money to do what I really wanted to do.

I keep telling myself that one day I’ll get to that point. One day, I’ll be able to write full time, and it will be the most glorious day ever. I hold on to that dream. Until then, I’ll continue to do what I have to do to make things work for me.

It’s not exactly being brave. It’s not taking that leap of faith and throwing my all into my dreams. I wish I could be like that. I wish I could stand up and walk out of my job, but that would cause me way more stress. I would worry about how I was going to pay the bills and put food on the table. I would worry about making things hard on my kids.

As much as I want to be, I’m not that brave. But I’m a dreamer, and as long as I have those, I’m happy. Like I said, I’m hoping one day my dream will come true, and every day I work to make it a reality. I find ways to promote myself and get out into the world. I send libraries information about the workshops I do, I try to have a presence online and promote my books as best as I can. But having time to do so much more would be awesome.

If you could be brave, what would you do? What shackles would you throw off to live the life you want to live?