This was quite a surprising discussion of dreams. It had never occurred to me that one might be someone other than oneself in a dream! I find that fascinating, and a little scary. But your overweight detective 'chasing heavily after someone on the staircase. . .' made use of a delightful adverb for the situation. My dreams used to be narrative, and full of puns that referred directly to ongoing situations in my life. But then I went through an abstract period when I wasn't in the dreams at all, only as a mind trying to invent or solve an impossible mathematical puzzle, or create a new geometrical shape that had never been seen before. I'm aware that I'm dreaming only insofar as I'm absolutely certain that what I'm dreaming is something that I've dreamed once or twice before. When I wake up, I realize that I've never had that dream before.
”But then I went through an abstract period when I wasn't in the dreams at all, only as a mind trying to invent or solve an impossible mathematical puzzle, or create a new geometrical shape that had never been seen before.” Oh, wow! That is remarkable, and glorious. When you wake up, do the puzzles or shapes persist — are they something that your waking mind can continue to work on?
On the being different characters thing, everyone who's told me that they are different characters in their dreams seemed to read a great deal of fiction, and at least one was a novel-writer as well. My theory is that the mind just uses the tools it has to hand, and sometimes that is fiction. Oddly, my mind seems to use film techniques too — cameras moving in for close-ups, that kind of thing — even though I don't actually have much knowledge of those.
Unfortunately the puzzles and shapes evaporated upon waking, but toward the end of those dreams I always said to myself, 'I must remember this when I wake up so that I can keep working on it!' But then I didn't remember, just vague snippets.(Sigh) As for your camera movements, I think anyone who has seen movies has subconsciously incorporated camera movements into their kinetic and visual vocabulary. The POV or 'I am a camera' has become natural to the modern being.
Fascinating. I wonder whether one day one will persist enough to capture on paper when you wake up, and what it will turn out to be if so — that is, if it will turn out to be a real puzzle that the mind was grappling with in the dream, or rather primarily an experience of grappling with a puzzle in the abstract.
On the camera movements — that makes sense, but it is truly at the subconscious level, if so. My mind seems to have an extensive repertoire of cinematic techniques at hand when it's generating dreams, but if you asked me to direct a scene (you wouldn't, I know! it feels presumptuous just to give the hypothetical 😊) I don't think that I could come up with a fraction of them, and certainly would not be able to use them skillfully. I’m pretty sure that I don't use them when I read, either — that is, I don't think that I turn novel scenes into cinematic ones in my mind. But maybe they are incorporated without one knowing it.
That never happened in my dreams, but there was a period of several years when I had hypnagogic episodes right before falling asleep--if I was extremely tired. They were so vivid and so detailed that I will always remember them. In those episodes there were a lot of tracking shots and zoom shots that brought me from a great height much closer to an open window of a skyscraper, for instance, or zoomed me out and away from a scene. These episodes (and sometimes extreme close-ups of strange faces) were far more detailed than dreams, but very short-lived and without any narrative--just sudden, intense, and then gone. I wrote to Oliver Sacks about them. He sent me a lovely handwritten note back, which is buried in my files somewhere. He had written about this phenomenon.
Oh, that's marvelous! That's a new one to me too. Do you think that your cat character thought like a cat, and did you experience moving the way a cat moves?
I was a cat, wandering between the feet of people sitting on chairs, hunting a mouse. I was definitely moving like a cat and probably thinking much like a cat too (though obviously i don't know how a cat really thinks)
😊. It's like the philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly, and on wakening wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't a butterfly dreaming that he was a philosopher. This sounds like a dream where the character was fully inhabited, so interesting to think about!
Amazing dreams! I would say I feel some dreams are ‘real’ in that I think of them as thoughts I have had or things experienced, even if quite silly. Dreams about meeting the dead are a special category here: they (the dead) always have a luminous presence that feels more than imagined on waking.
I like that very much — dreams as thoughts one has had, as well as things experienced. I find that too, that dreams feel like things experienced, though usually not quite as much so as actual lived experiences. But some books or movies have been even more intense than dreams — the topic for part 2! Remarkable about this experience of dreaming the dead; it sounds magical, in the best way. I think that I've had something like that only once.
I found this consideration of dreams fascinating. My dreams are frequently offshoots from events during the day, are very often unsettling and can have a deeply resonant effect. I am always myself and was really surprised to discover that others were not.I rather like the idea of being a cat!
Oh, I somehow missed this earlier! Resonant — what a perfect word. Yes, that's what I'm trying to feel my way towards, somehow — the ways dream stories can continue resonate after they are over, and how that can be paralleled by other forms of story, like books and novels. I love the fully inhabited cat, too; it's marvelous.
This is fascinating! I'm intrigued by the people who only ever dream as themselves; some of my dreams are like a film I've sat down to watch, with no known characters including the POV character, and some thrilling plot. I never remember enough to write down when I wake up and I suspect in the cold light of day they would make no narrative sense.
I have woken up from dreams crying; infused with the bubbling joy of a new love; utterly bereft though I have no idea what it is I've lost; panicking - in other words I often experience dreams just as intensely and realistically as life itself. Not to pre-empt part 2, but I can't say I've ever experienced a film anywhere near as intensely (books have come close).
Fascinating! Is the POV character always fully inhabited by you (ie, you experience what that character experiences, rather than just witnessing them)? I'm so glad you wrote that second paragraph, especially — it makes me think that it did indeed make sense to start the discussion of stories with this bit on dreams. It gives us a shared starting point for thinking about the intensity (or not) of our experiences of fiction, just as you did perfectly here. Part 2 coming!
I think the POV character is always inhabited by me but I wouldn’t swear to it. I’m going to have to dig out my notes for an online course I did about a decade ago, it was to do with how real a fictional character can be (more real than someone who exists but you’ve never met, I think).
Ps, I have a vague memory of reading somewhere (in some academic study or other), that people who write fiction are disproportionately likely to be other characters in their dreams.
This is a fascinating piece. Your dream of being a man and an overweight one and running? Did you see yourself somehow? How did you know you were a man. Was it a deep knowledge or the physical attributes. I have never dreamed of being anyone else though the cast in many of my dreams is huge with a myriad of well rounded characters that I know very well. This is all quite fascinating!
What excellent questions! They had never occurred to me, and I have had to think them through quite a bit. Fascinating. The best answer I can come up with is that these fictional dreams are essentially like reading a novel: if one (or I, in any case) is reading a novel, and the POV character is a large man running down a set of stairs, one imagines, while reading, what it would feel like to be a large man running down a flight of stairs. And then one's mind draws on all of that reading experience to create the stories in dreams. I don't bother to include smells in my imagination when I'm reading, for instance, and I don't think that my dreams ever include smells, presumably becuase my mind is not in the habit of generating them. (Or that could be the influence of movies as fiction, where we are accustomed to stories without smells also.)
Thanks for asking! I meant this section as a way in to talking about the experience of being deeply affected by books, movies and other texts, so this is really helpful.
Are the well-rounded characters in your dreams recurring characters, and are they all fictional?
I think, you and I could talk about the subject for weeks.
The well rounded characters in my dreams are people I know very well in that dream; but not people I necessarily know in real life. Though to be fair, sometimes they ARE people I know very well in real life.
If somebody comes into your dream, and you know them well, but haven’t talked to THEM for a long time, do you then get in touch with them? I’ve done this on a number of occasions and found to my delight that I have gotten in touch with them at exactly the right time. Now that sounds pretty fanciful. But is weirdly true.
And now we are way off the subject.
Now that you mention it I don’t smell in my dreams either. I am trying to think whether I hear sounds. I have heard footsteps - I think - but I don’t hear voices.
What a wonderful discussion.
Thank you for making me think a little more deeply about my dreams.
So interesting! More on all of this maybe — the ways we inhabit stories when we dream, or read, or watch movies — in part 2 of this essay. And perhaps the conversation can continue there. I really appreciated your Home for Wayward Girls memoir piece, by the way. And felt very much the experiences of your ”I” character.
Ps, in all my dreams, whether I am myself or some other character, I only see of myself what we all see of ourselves as we move through the world. So I don't know what my face looked like in that dream, or hair, as I was running, but I do have an idea of the color of the pants and jacket!
What a rich, fscinating dream life you have, Maria. Even more so than mine (I’m a bit envious). I am always some aspect of myself in dreams and have found inspiration tbere for writing. In my last book an important vignette came from a dream.
I remember an especially intense dream that you included in an essay once, in fact while this one was underway. Your dream has stayed with me; the emotions behind it, as you described it, were so powerful.
The discussion of dreams here is meant mainly as an entry point into the discussions of fiction that begin in part 2. Part 3, discussing specific works, is coming soon.
This was quite a surprising discussion of dreams. It had never occurred to me that one might be someone other than oneself in a dream! I find that fascinating, and a little scary. But your overweight detective 'chasing heavily after someone on the staircase. . .' made use of a delightful adverb for the situation. My dreams used to be narrative, and full of puns that referred directly to ongoing situations in my life. But then I went through an abstract period when I wasn't in the dreams at all, only as a mind trying to invent or solve an impossible mathematical puzzle, or create a new geometrical shape that had never been seen before. I'm aware that I'm dreaming only insofar as I'm absolutely certain that what I'm dreaming is something that I've dreamed once or twice before. When I wake up, I realize that I've never had that dream before.
”But then I went through an abstract period when I wasn't in the dreams at all, only as a mind trying to invent or solve an impossible mathematical puzzle, or create a new geometrical shape that had never been seen before.” Oh, wow! That is remarkable, and glorious. When you wake up, do the puzzles or shapes persist — are they something that your waking mind can continue to work on?
On the being different characters thing, everyone who's told me that they are different characters in their dreams seemed to read a great deal of fiction, and at least one was a novel-writer as well. My theory is that the mind just uses the tools it has to hand, and sometimes that is fiction. Oddly, my mind seems to use film techniques too — cameras moving in for close-ups, that kind of thing — even though I don't actually have much knowledge of those.
Unfortunately the puzzles and shapes evaporated upon waking, but toward the end of those dreams I always said to myself, 'I must remember this when I wake up so that I can keep working on it!' But then I didn't remember, just vague snippets.(Sigh) As for your camera movements, I think anyone who has seen movies has subconsciously incorporated camera movements into their kinetic and visual vocabulary. The POV or 'I am a camera' has become natural to the modern being.
Fascinating. I wonder whether one day one will persist enough to capture on paper when you wake up, and what it will turn out to be if so — that is, if it will turn out to be a real puzzle that the mind was grappling with in the dream, or rather primarily an experience of grappling with a puzzle in the abstract.
On the camera movements — that makes sense, but it is truly at the subconscious level, if so. My mind seems to have an extensive repertoire of cinematic techniques at hand when it's generating dreams, but if you asked me to direct a scene (you wouldn't, I know! it feels presumptuous just to give the hypothetical 😊) I don't think that I could come up with a fraction of them, and certainly would not be able to use them skillfully. I’m pretty sure that I don't use them when I read, either — that is, I don't think that I turn novel scenes into cinematic ones in my mind. But maybe they are incorporated without one knowing it.
That never happened in my dreams, but there was a period of several years when I had hypnagogic episodes right before falling asleep--if I was extremely tired. They were so vivid and so detailed that I will always remember them. In those episodes there were a lot of tracking shots and zoom shots that brought me from a great height much closer to an open window of a skyscraper, for instance, or zoomed me out and away from a scene. These episodes (and sometimes extreme close-ups of strange faces) were far more detailed than dreams, but very short-lived and without any narrative--just sudden, intense, and then gone. I wrote to Oliver Sacks about them. He sent me a lovely handwritten note back, which is buried in my files somewhere. He had written about this phenomenon.
Wow — remarkable.
Oh this is really interesting. In my dreams I am mostly myself, but once i was very definitely, very vividly a cat.
My dream experiences seem very real in a different way to the reality of day to day living. I have various dream places that i visit regularly.
Oh, that's marvelous! That's a new one to me too. Do you think that your cat character thought like a cat, and did you experience moving the way a cat moves?
I was a cat, wandering between the feet of people sitting on chairs, hunting a mouse. I was definitely moving like a cat and probably thinking much like a cat too (though obviously i don't know how a cat really thinks)
😊. It's like the philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly, and on wakening wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't a butterfly dreaming that he was a philosopher. This sounds like a dream where the character was fully inhabited, so interesting to think about!
Amazing dreams! I would say I feel some dreams are ‘real’ in that I think of them as thoughts I have had or things experienced, even if quite silly. Dreams about meeting the dead are a special category here: they (the dead) always have a luminous presence that feels more than imagined on waking.
I like that very much — dreams as thoughts one has had, as well as things experienced. I find that too, that dreams feel like things experienced, though usually not quite as much so as actual lived experiences. But some books or movies have been even more intense than dreams — the topic for part 2! Remarkable about this experience of dreaming the dead; it sounds magical, in the best way. I think that I've had something like that only once.
I am so sorry I am late to this.
I found this consideration of dreams fascinating. My dreams are frequently offshoots from events during the day, are very often unsettling and can have a deeply resonant effect. I am always myself and was really surprised to discover that others were not.I rather like the idea of being a cat!
Oh, I somehow missed this earlier! Resonant — what a perfect word. Yes, that's what I'm trying to feel my way towards, somehow — the ways dream stories can continue resonate after they are over, and how that can be paralleled by other forms of story, like books and novels. I love the fully inhabited cat, too; it's marvelous.
PS I came across this this morning by odd coincidence https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/12/how-to-optimise-the-cognitive-benefits-of-dreams-and-sleep
Very interesting!
This is fascinating! I'm intrigued by the people who only ever dream as themselves; some of my dreams are like a film I've sat down to watch, with no known characters including the POV character, and some thrilling plot. I never remember enough to write down when I wake up and I suspect in the cold light of day they would make no narrative sense.
I have woken up from dreams crying; infused with the bubbling joy of a new love; utterly bereft though I have no idea what it is I've lost; panicking - in other words I often experience dreams just as intensely and realistically as life itself. Not to pre-empt part 2, but I can't say I've ever experienced a film anywhere near as intensely (books have come close).
Fascinating! Is the POV character always fully inhabited by you (ie, you experience what that character experiences, rather than just witnessing them)? I'm so glad you wrote that second paragraph, especially — it makes me think that it did indeed make sense to start the discussion of stories with this bit on dreams. It gives us a shared starting point for thinking about the intensity (or not) of our experiences of fiction, just as you did perfectly here. Part 2 coming!
I think the POV character is always inhabited by me but I wouldn’t swear to it. I’m going to have to dig out my notes for an online course I did about a decade ago, it was to do with how real a fictional character can be (more real than someone who exists but you’ve never met, I think).
Ps, I have a vague memory of reading somewhere (in some academic study or other), that people who write fiction are disproportionately likely to be other characters in their dreams.
I did wonder if there would be a correlation - it makes sense, I guess :-)
This is a fascinating piece. Your dream of being a man and an overweight one and running? Did you see yourself somehow? How did you know you were a man. Was it a deep knowledge or the physical attributes. I have never dreamed of being anyone else though the cast in many of my dreams is huge with a myriad of well rounded characters that I know very well. This is all quite fascinating!
What excellent questions! They had never occurred to me, and I have had to think them through quite a bit. Fascinating. The best answer I can come up with is that these fictional dreams are essentially like reading a novel: if one (or I, in any case) is reading a novel, and the POV character is a large man running down a set of stairs, one imagines, while reading, what it would feel like to be a large man running down a flight of stairs. And then one's mind draws on all of that reading experience to create the stories in dreams. I don't bother to include smells in my imagination when I'm reading, for instance, and I don't think that my dreams ever include smells, presumably becuase my mind is not in the habit of generating them. (Or that could be the influence of movies as fiction, where we are accustomed to stories without smells also.)
Thanks for asking! I meant this section as a way in to talking about the experience of being deeply affected by books, movies and other texts, so this is really helpful.
Are the well-rounded characters in your dreams recurring characters, and are they all fictional?
I think, you and I could talk about the subject for weeks.
The well rounded characters in my dreams are people I know very well in that dream; but not people I necessarily know in real life. Though to be fair, sometimes they ARE people I know very well in real life.
If somebody comes into your dream, and you know them well, but haven’t talked to THEM for a long time, do you then get in touch with them? I’ve done this on a number of occasions and found to my delight that I have gotten in touch with them at exactly the right time. Now that sounds pretty fanciful. But is weirdly true.
And now we are way off the subject.
Now that you mention it I don’t smell in my dreams either. I am trying to think whether I hear sounds. I have heard footsteps - I think - but I don’t hear voices.
What a wonderful discussion.
Thank you for making me think a little more deeply about my dreams.
So interesting! More on all of this maybe — the ways we inhabit stories when we dream, or read, or watch movies — in part 2 of this essay. And perhaps the conversation can continue there. I really appreciated your Home for Wayward Girls memoir piece, by the way. And felt very much the experiences of your ”I” character.
Thank you! I think if I were to make a movie it would be that one.
Do it! The story goes against expectations, in the absolutely best way.
Ps, in all my dreams, whether I am myself or some other character, I only see of myself what we all see of ourselves as we move through the world. So I don't know what my face looked like in that dream, or hair, as I was running, but I do have an idea of the color of the pants and jacket!
What a rich, fscinating dream life you have, Maria. Even more so than mine (I’m a bit envious). I am always some aspect of myself in dreams and have found inspiration tbere for writing. In my last book an important vignette came from a dream.
I remember an especially intense dream that you included in an essay once, in fact while this one was underway. Your dream has stayed with me; the emotions behind it, as you described it, were so powerful.
The discussion of dreams here is meant mainly as an entry point into the discussions of fiction that begin in part 2. Part 3, discussing specific works, is coming soon.
My dream stayed with you? Must have been a doozie. I am honored.
Being in your friend's house — it was, indeed.