dreams as inspiration-- or not

My dreams go from amazing to pedestrian. Sometimes they fit into my day-- at other times not so much.

The times when I am less interested in what I look like tend to be the ones where I'll have a dream with people telling me how gorgeous I am or looking at me openly admiring. My current state of being overweight (if not obese) disappears in such dreams. After one of those, you are desired by everyone, I wake up thinking-- does my subconscious really see me so insecure that I need bolstering?

from Stencil images

More than once, I've dreamed an opening scene for a book that when I wake I know I can use. That happened recently where in the dream a man threw a child into a roiling caldron of seawater (which at the coast we call devil's punch bowls). The hero (looking just like the images that will be him in my work in progress) saw it happen, realized the child could never survive until professional rescuers could arrive, and dove into the water, getting hold of the child and managing to get him on a safe ledge where the heroine, a natural witch, used her own elemental powers to bring the child to the top. As the hero realized he might not be able to get himself out of the hole, she brought him up. It was the first time he believed she was what she had told him. I hadn't planned an episode like that in the WIP but began to think how I could use it as it suits other plot elements. The dream did help my story but did it have another meaning I missing-- one for me personally?

My dream from last week, still vividly in my memory, went the opposite  direction from reassuring myself that I am all right, and it isn't for a scene for a book. 

Living in a kind of apartment building (one I don't recognize), I want so much to be accepted by a groups. I don't really know why I am not, but my life, even when in the midst of others, feels lonely and closed off. I reach to them, but they never reach for me.  I am chosen for nothing. I recognize it's like my high school years all over again.

Wanting to be accepted, I show one of the group's popular leader a piece I had written praising their newest project. I had written it to overcome my jealousy. I am looking for attaboys that I am not admitting. I invite her to my apartment to read it before I publish it.

She is nice, reads it, and then looks up with an uneasy expression before she looks around my apartment. She says, 'I sympathize with you-- but you do understand why you are not part of our group?' When I don't answer, she says, 'Look at this apartment with dirt on the floor and the windows haven't been washed ever.'

I try to make an excuse. 'I've washed them. They're not that bad.'

She then looks at me and says, 'How could you fit with us?' She shakes her head. 'You're such a plain little person.'

'Well, I'm not little.' I was fully aware that was because I was fat-- as I try to not cry. I manage a smile that I don't feel. 'I need to take a shower.' 

The woman nods and leaves, heading back to her fans and friends, while I head toward the shower and a sob fest, but instead wake up. 

It was about 2am. What did that mean? My muse had chosen a woman I know only from the Internet, but she fits the personality and looked like the dream woman. I think she represented all the ones who are on the inside, the ones everybody wants to be friends with, the ones chosen to lead, those who decide who fits and who does not. Women like that aren't really the mean girls like the movie. They are mostly likable, funny, and admired--including by me. They just don't see me as fitting and not sure I can clean up whatever it is that blocks me. 

When I left high school, I thought I had put behind me a lot of the insecurity of a world with cliques. I've found those cliques a few times since then, like in our rural church. But in terms of revealing light and dark, building power, or tearing it down, the Internet is a cosmos of its own. It has the potential for the best and worst to be brought out.

In my experience with the Internet through chat rooms to Facebook, I've seen that some are in on the joke, and they have everyone laughing while I am still trying to figure out what the joke was. My muse/subconscious was not doing anything to build me up with that last dream other than to say--- face how you really feel.

Other than waking me up feeling depressed, I did get one positive thing from that dream-- it helped me get an even stronger handle on my heroine in the WIP because she is shy and never feels she fits. Her more powerful mother and sisters do not mean to but their very strengths have left her unable to see her own powers. Bringing me back, to feeling like I was back in high school, did help me connect with her-- but now may I have one of those-- oh, my gosh, you are so gorgeous dreams?

To end on a positive note, this is the hero for the third paranormal, suspense romance. Some years back, I bought this image on CanStock.