Dreams Within Dreams

"Last night’s dream: 'The Forest of Misplaced Inventory,' said the dream voice. 'That shouldn’t take much description!' The visual was a stack of shrink-wrapped red plastic garbage-can lids in a stand of green spruce trees.

     It must have been a writing dream. I sometimes have those. But what was it trying to tell me? Dreams often pun: Was the key word invention? Has my invention inventory been mislaid somewhere among the synaptic neuron branches? Will I find out later? In a novel I probably would, but life isn’t a novel, and vice versa.


The best writing dream I ever had was in the mid-Sixties. I dreamt I’d written an opera about a nineteenth-century English emigrant called Susanna Moodie, whose account of her awful experiences, Roughing It In The Bush, was among my parents’ books. It was a very emphatic dream, so I researched Mrs. Moodie, and eventually wrote a poem sequence, a television play, and a novel—Alias Grace—all based on material found in her work. But that sort of dream experience is rare."
— Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books
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Buy Susanna Moodie's Roughing It In The Bush and all of Margaret Atwood's books here...