Blog Hop for Rebecca Emin: When Dreams Come True

This is a post to celebrate the release of my dear friend Rebecca Emin's latest novel, "When Dreams Come True". The theme of the day is making positive dreams manifest so I'll chat a wee bit about dreams.

I am a lucid dreamer, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the sort of dream one is having. It's rather a better time having a dream of a canoe trip down a rainbow river with Cillian Murphy feeding you grapes than say, a dream that involves a burning roof and a wheezing attempt at escaping a cheesy slasher movie fiend. As an adult, I find these dreams, both the good and bad, to be something to look forward to. It's a wonderful escape into fantasy and a great stress reliever, or on occasion problem solver to be able to dream like this.

As a child, however, the dreams could be confusing and not so fun, especially if there were periods of time when I couldn't quite tell if the tiger I'd barely survived running from was real or in a dream. The nice dreams, however, not only told me I could be anything I wanted, they also let me FEEL it. As a child, dreaming that I could be a pirate or gunslinger, Bond girl or international spy, were glorious reminders that I was not as small and plain and shy as I felt during the day.

I was often crippled by loneliness and shyness, even in the presence of friends as a girl, and sometimes even now, but the dreams never failed to energize and excite me. There came a point, when I was quite young, where I couldn't bear the period of forgetting that comes after waking from a dream. So I began to write them down, unicorns and dragons, Queens and attacking extra-terrestrials all began to appear within the pages of the spiral bound notebook kept by my bed. Of course I wanted to share the dreams with everyone else, and so the dreams soon became stories.

"You're going to be a writer!" People would tell me, and I would feel a rush of happiness and dare I say... pride upon hearing it, which is not a feeling I attached to anything else accomplished by my little hands at the time. I received compliments on imagination and creativity, and I never failed to point out that everything came from dreams, without them I'd have empty pages.

Such is the importance of dreams.

Another hearty congratulations to Rebecca Emin, an accomplished writer who is certainly fighting for her dreams.