The Lab Notebook

[This is a catch-up post. This dream is from the night of November 25-26.]

Awake, Non-lucid dream, [Commentary made while awake]

I'm attending a writers' workshop at the home of author Beverly Cleary. Every single wall of the house is completely covered with filled bookshelves. I'm walking through the house, picking my way among people in sleeping bags lying on the floor.

Dreamskip. Now everyone is awake and listening to Cleary speak. She announces to all the attendees that she's retiring from writing. Her assistant says: “Does anyone have any questions? Real questions? Realer questions?”

One of the other attendees asks if anyone else there is willing to answer a question, and I volunteer to answer it, saying, “I can make a halfhearted effort at answering.” I say this because I don't think my answer can possibly be anywhere near as good as Cleary's. The assistant introduces me to the other attendee with the question as the author of the forthcoming novel “Artist.” In the dream, I know that the assistant is referring to my current NaNoWriMo novel [the one I was working on in real life when I had this dream], but I think, That's not the right title. [At that point, I hadn't given that novel a title yet in real life, but I still somehow knew that that wasn't the right one.] The other attendee gives me a thin ARC [Advance Reader Copy] of his (or her? I'm not sure) new book, and asks me if I'm interested in reading it and how long it would take me to read it. I am interested, because it has Piers Anthony's name on it as a reference, and is obviously high fantasy based on the cover design. I flip through it and say, “I could read this in an hour, maybe two.”

The other attendee and I walk through the house, which is crowded with workshop attendees. In the room where we end up, there are some people sitting around a picnic table, and David C. is one of them. The other attendee who gave me the ARC asks me something about what the group dynamic at this writers' workshop is like. I answer, then start telling him (her?) about the characteristics of the T./M. Writers' Group [I don't know of one in real life, besides the NaNoWriMo group] and F. Writers Read. Then I woke up. This one was so cool that I thought about trying to DEILD back in, but I didn't because I knew I'd already moved around too much.

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Side notes:

This dream was awesome. Not only did I have particularly good recall, especially for the many spoken conversations in the dream, but even better, somebody introduced me as the author of a forthcoming novel. Being the author of a published novel is one of my biggest real-life goals. Also, the night I had this dream was the night before Black Friday, and I had set a goal for that day of breaking my previous personal record for the most words of fiction written in a single day. I succeeded. I think this dream indicates that my intention to finish the draft I've started without stopping at the end of November had taken root firmly in my mind. Rawk.