Dreaming Stories

I woke up with a dream lingering in my mind. It was equal parts strange and beautiful and I’ve been trying to hang on to it all day and somewhat unsuccessfully. As the colors started to define themselves in my memory and the characters started to reveal their voices to me, I thought wow, this might be the start of a lovely story. But then the day began, with the whining and the to do list and the everything else and as the day has worn on, the dream has started to fade. I’ve forgotten most of the characters now and the circumstances; mostly it’s the colors that have stuck with me at this point.

And the colors were so extraordinarily vivid for a dream like this. There were the most gorgeous shades of orange; bright golden, shimmering hues of orange that billowed in the air like clouds. And every possible shade of brown I could have ever imagined. We were in the desert and it was lovely. I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen a landscape like that before. It was a little like when I wrote about seeing southwestern Colorado for the first time; really seeing all the variance in color and texture where before I had only seen scraggly bushes and dirt. It was like for every minute I looked at the barren rock and sand and dirt, new colors emerged, new levels of texture and dimension. And interwoven into everything were the vast oranges.

It really was beautiful.

And there were camels. I think. And we were on an adventure of some kind. I can’t remember much more than that anymore though. The whos and the whys have been swallowed up by the farmer’s market and playing in the fountain and cooking dinner.

It’s the first time in a very, very long time that I’ve woken from a dream and thought about writing it out. Letting the dream guide my writing into something that probably would not have occurred to me awake. So I am a little sad that I lost it, but at least the colors stayed with me, it’s just about worth losing the rest just for the colors.