Dreaming - Everyone Does It!

I am a prolific dreamer.

If I wrote as much as I dreamed, I'd have worn off my fingerprints by now from typing.
Each morning, I wake and try to remember my last dream. I do this because my immediate mood is affected by what I was just experiencing in my dream. This morning I woke slightly amazed because my nephew had discovered how to fly. No one had ever tried this before and he was just brave enough to jump off a tower into the wind to discover if he put his arms out he could fly, like skydivers without falling. Like going to one of those skydiving places with a wind tube at the mall. He was able to direct himself over to pick up a jacket he'd left at a park and come back. I was impressed. I woke impressed but worried for his safety.
Dreams are the result of an active hind brain that won't go to sleep when the rest of the brain shuts down for the night. Like an ADD child, this part of the brain keeps going, nudging the rest of you to pay attention. Playing with toys, essentially, while you sleep.
But what if outside forces could penetrate those dreams, your subconscious, to insert suggestions? Like in the movie Inception? Leonardo diCaprio was developing a way to insert suggestions into a business mogul's mind, taking dreaming to a whole new thriller level.

I love the mystery surrounding dreams. Like the weather, it's something that we all have in common whether we are rich people, dirt poor, athletes or housebound, old or young, everyone dreams.

It's with that in mind that I write books that always have dreams. I ask my readers to interpret as they read, essentially. In my Dream Jumper series, dreams are crucial because the heroes can enter other people's dreams and use that to solve a mystery and eventually do good in the world. I wrote this first book before Inception was a movie and thought I had a unique idea. And now, the first book in the series, The Dream Jumper's Promise, is optioned for film with hopes to begin filming in the next year.

Dreams are our subconscious's way of working out problems and questions in our brain, keeping us thinking and at the very least not turning off. If we listen to our dreams, the experts say that we can learn secrets about ourselves. If you dream of your teeth falling out it could mean you feel insecure of your physical self or you feel out of control about something.

If dreams are metaphorical representations of our waking expectations, I now know I have some degree of concern over my nephew and his life. It's interesting to remember dreams, interpret them and move on to your waking life every morning.
Happy Dreams, Everyone!

KIM HORNSBY is an Amazon #1 Bestselling novelist who lives in the Seattle area and writes books about women in dire circumstances rescuing themselves. She tweets her dreams most mornings over here on Twitter under the hashtag #StrandDreams
www.twitter.com/kimhornsby
Feel free to follow her to keep up with her unusual dream life...

Newsletter Signup for Book Releases & Free Stuff www.bit.ly/KimHNews

Kim's AMAZON site www.bit.ly/kimamzn

Dreaming and Remembering Them

Dreaming. Everyone does it. But not everyone remembers their dreams when they wake. I usually remember the last thing I dreamed and when I wake up I try to compose a tweet about the dream. Then I tweet it when I get on my computer, an hour later. Sometimes sooner.
If you follow me on twitter you'll see these rambling tweets. Or go over to #strangedreams It's mostly me and my dreams on that site.
Sometimes dreams leave me with an emotion I carry with me throughout the morning and that can really suck if the subject matter was scary or sad. I'm sure we've all woken up sad and wondered why. I love it when I have a happy dream and wake up happy, or excited about something, or wake up having just had a flying dream. These are my favorites and I have to wonder how I know what it feels like to fly.
But I do.
I have a very clear idea of what it feels like to be up that high and to glide over cities and water and bridges and trees. I wish I could dream of flying every night but I probably only have one of these a month. The feeling of flying is heady and wonderful, like scuba diving in some regards.

Dreams are still an enigma in this modern world. Scientists say it's our hind brain not shutting off when we sleep and feeding us images and ideas, like a pestering child. I prefer to think we actually visit alternate universes.We travel while we sleep.
I write books that always have the protagonist dreaming. Sometimes the heroine has a recurring dream. I have a novel series where the two main characters dream together and apparently this is possible. I had no idea when I started this series.
Dreams have always found their way into my books. Early on in my writing career, I heard that it's an author no no to start a novel with a dream. And to end the novel by saying the story was all a dream. Then I heard that people don't read books about dreams. I wasn't sure why but by the time I heard this advice I was too far gone and working on my next book about Dream Jumping, or sharing dreams. It's only been recently that I realized that the one thing all my novels have in common is dreaming. All the female protagonists are affected by their nightly dreams. Even the novel I'm releasing in the next few months, and doesn't have a thread of supernatural in it, has some strange dreams. Even my romantic suspense novel has the heroine dreaming about this and that. Mostly about the hunky, yet elusive neighbor. Because I remember dreams in the morning and because my husband calls out in his dreams nightly, I am affected greatly by my dream life.
The Dream Jumper Series has some weird-ass dreams and lots of information on lucid dreaming, Wake Induced Lucid Dreams and even ghosts entering dreams, which is something I think I made up until I hear from a reader that it's happened to them.

What about you? Do you dream? Ever had a lucid dream where you know you're dreaming?

Freaky Dreams-Had Any?

Dreams can be freaky. Just the thought of going off somewhere with strangers while you sleep is enough to keep anyone awake. Anyone or anything can enter your dream life to attack or torment. Conversely, you can do anything within a dream, be anyone you want. Wouldn’t it be FAN-Freaky-TASTIC to just set an order for a dream about your favorite movie star or a tropical vacation and then go to sleep knowing it would be your REM entertainment? 

Some believe you can. I tried it the other night but it kind of backfired. I was thinking about Hugh Jackman singing to me when I went to sleep but instead of dreaming of Wolverine or Van Helsing, I had a dream that I was Chuck Norris's girlfriend and he was REALLY standoffish. (I'd been tossing around Chuck Norris jokes with my daughter earlier) Maybe the trick is to think of your dreamy boyfriend earlier in the day then try to forget him so it gets pushed back to the hindbrain. Read on...

Some experts think that dreams are nothing but your pesky hindbrain’s need for stimulation while the body has gone to sleep. During REM (Rapid Eye Movement or Deep Sleep) messages are sent to the front brain to keep active and those messages link up with your memories and feelings to concoct a dream. Here’s a funny example: In a study, dreamers who wore red colored glasses before sleep had dreams that involved the color red. Taking this further, I’m wondering if I went to sleep with photos of Hugh Jackman taped to my eyeballs...

If you were hoping that dreams were more mysterious, keep reading. Something truly freaky is coming. Not everyone believes that your dream themes stem from sexual frustrations. Even Freud. Many scientists who have analyzed dreams have no explanations or interpretations but most agree that if you’re being chased, it probably means you’re afraid of something in waking life.

There is a whole, huge dream dictionary online where you can retrieve specifics but again, no one knows for sure what a dream means. Some common themes such as public nudity, losing teeth, and flying, continue to baffle even the best psychiatrists. I think we can all agree if you dream you have gone to a PTA meeting stark-naked, you have repressed insecurities and feelings of not being well liked by your peers. Can we move on to less obvious ideas now?

Flying is supposedly linked to sexual feelings but I disagree. I’d like to agree because I dream of flying all the time and I’m damned good at it. An expert, in fact. 'Nuff said.

My recurring dream theme is about entering a house with rooms, and doors, and connections to more rooms that never seem to end. Often the top floor is haunted by something evil, the wind swirling around ominously, spirits taunting me to climb the stairs etc. Sometimes I must rescue something up there. Once it was my mother who’d recently died. She was a tiny owl and I set her free out a window. But usually I avoid the top floor knowing that it is the worst form of evil there is and the likelihood of getting out is not good. I don’t even venture to the floor just below it in case something grabs me. According to dream sites, the house is me, my mind, and the attic is supposed to be my intellect. So what I get from this is: I’m afraid to be intelligent. Is that what you got too? In real life, I am not a cerebral Rhodes scholar type person whose thirst for knowledge drives me to distraction. I’m a people person (I like to say, cheerfully). So maybe my hindbrain wants more and my front brain thinks it’s a bad idea to get too smart. I don’t know.

Lucid dreams are when you know you’re dreaming within your dream. Ever done that? I remember as early as five years old having a dream about my kindergarten teacher throwing me down the stairs (don’t ask) and me saying to her that it was fine that she was about to send me flying because it was only a dream.

Then, there are things called W.I.L.D. dreams and I’m not talking about what you might think. Wake Induced Lucid Dreams are the holy grail of lucid dreaming. It’s a method of going from fully awake to a lucid dream of vivid proportions. Supposedly it takes a ton of practice and very few can do it. This is where ordering your dream might kick in nicely.

During the time you are in REM at night, you are dreaming, whether you remember them or not. If you are woken during REM, you are more likely to remember your dream. Try this idea by setting an alarm clock. You could be rewarded by remembering one. 

Here’s the freaky part I was telling you about. There is such a thing as a precognitive dream where you dream something that comes true. Now this idea is completely inexplicable in scientific terms and not well received by anyone who tends to think logically. However, Mark Twain once had a vivid precognitive dream showing his beloved brother in a coffin with an arrangement of roses on his chest, only to have it come true within the month. His brother was killed in a tugboat explosion and ended up in a coffin exactly like the one in the dream, right down to the one red rose in the midst of all the white roses. Charles Dickens had two supernatural experiences involving dreams. Once, his dead father visited him in a dream and Charles awoke to find him sitting on the edge of his bed. The second time, he dreamed of his sister in law who’d recently died. He’d loved her in real life and had several dreams of meeting her in his dreams. After one such dream, he awoke to see her apparition floating in his bedroom, eventually disappearing through the room’s ceiling. I did not know this when I wrote The Dream Jumper’s Promise but found this very interesting. If you read my book, you’ll see why.

In that novel I take the idea of lucid dreaming and W.I.L.D. dreaming one step further to a level where you are able to share dreams with another person. I honestly thought I made this up but it turns out there is such a thing as a shared dream. And it turns out there is a movie called "Inception" about this too. When I saw the ad for that movie a few years ago, I was angry that they’d somehow stolen my idea but I finished editing the book and eventually published anyways. I’m glad I did because there are many differences in how the writer of "Inception" and I approach dream jumping. For one, my jumper doesn’t intravenously squirt anything into his veins. He enters the dream through a psychic connection, matching his breathing to his subject’s. Luckily Jamey Dunn (my hero) is a moral person and would never jump into someone’s dream to swindle a Fortune 500 business man.

In The Dream Jumper’s Promise, Jamey and his former love Tina, (who has just lost her husband) share dreams to try to find out what happened the day the husband went surfing and never returned. I wanted to call it a paranormal theme but there are no vampires or shape shifters. Then I wanted to call it romantic suspense but it’s got this para aspect. Maybe someday Amazon Kindle will have a category within paranormal called Dream Jumping. You never know.

Obviously I find dreaming extremely fascinating. How about you? Had any strange dreams lately? Let's hear!