Dream Diary

Things that have happened in the last week:

1. I discovered one of my running routes may be .5-1 mile longer than I thought (which would explain why my times are always worse than expected when I run it).
2. Speaking of running, I just got back to my normal running schedule after 3 weeks of unusual and recovery runs, so this morning's 4-mile-fast run felt like death. Thank heavens for cold showers after hot summer runs!
3. I've been working hard on my work in progress, revising it and polishing it as much as I can.

The work in progress is the one about sleep and dreams. I'm currently working on 3 books at once (Arts and Thefts finalization, a third Jeremy Wilderson book, and this other one), but I call the dream book my work in progress because it's a new project.

As a result or driving into dream science and spending so much time and energy using my imagination, I've been having some weird dreams lately. Weird, vivid dreams that leave me wondering, "Where did that come from?" I usually have pretty vivid dreams, but this last week they've been weirder than normal.

So, here are some of my recent bonkers dreams. We'll see if any of them turn into stories (my WIP came from a dream, appropriately enough):

- Snowy morning in June (I blame watching the new live-action Beauty and the Beast three times in three days for this one). I was on vacation in some small resort town, and it was snowing, but I still needed to go running early in the morning. I remember this dream because the cold of the snow was so vivid, as was the taste of the dark chocolate I bought during said run from the candy store that was strangely open at 3 am.

- Apocalypse. I dreamed that something had happened that had destroyed modern civilization, and my dad was trying to protect me and my siblings as we traveled through Provo. (Happy Father's Day, all!) I don't know where my mom was. I do know, though, that there was widespread flooding and people were dropping into comas for no good reason. Other people were finding these amulets that looked like crescent moons, and, if you had one with you when you returned to the place of your birth, you'd get superpowers. I was born in Provo, so I wanted to find one! I was trying to solve what had happened and how to stop it from getting worse. The other thing I remember about this dream was that people who still had indoor plumbing charged people to use their toilets. Seems like a good apocalyptic strategy.

- The half marathon from Hades. Clearly, I dream about running a lot. This one, I'm sure, comes from the two halves I did recently. But this race was organized by a despotic government that had magical monsters and powers behind them. I was part of some group that believed that by running this race, I'd have a chance to counter some of that power and prepare for a coup. They were helping me cheat (apparently, that was needed to counter all the other racers' cheating), but they still expected me to take 3 days to finish a race that currently takes me two hours. Oh, and the kids from Fablehaven were there.

 
- A TV show based on my book. I dreamed I was watching a TV show based on the Jeremy Wilderson books and I was on episode 5, which is impressive considering I've only written 3 books, so it was going further than I'd written. I was upset because they had some good ideas, and I couldn't use them because I wasn't the one who came up with them. But then I woke up and realized that they were, technically, my ideas because I dreamed them and I can use them if I want to.

So, that's my dreaming recently, or at least, what I can remember of them. When I sleep deeply, and am exhausted mentally and physically before bed, I have dreams like this. I can't express how vivid they are: I've been able to feel and taste things in the dreams like they're real. Maybe I should keep journaling what I dream, for research purposes.

Here are this week's debut:

Young Adult:
Larissa C. Hardesty - Kiss Me Kill You (6/19)