Journal #86

1/13: The dream I had was one of the more colorful ones I've had in a while, continuing the trend of dreams trying to show me ideas for my writing YA/teen lit since winter 2011-spring 2012. This has been the trend since a dream I had on September 6, 2019 where some recurring dream characters over the years started to become younger and colorful, like a few dreams I had between 2012 and 2016.

This time, I found myself in what appeared to be a cross between a middle or high school's library and a Barnes & Noble surrounded by children and teenagers between the ages of 12 to at least 17, and it seemed as if they were leaving when I hear music in the key of F minor, and being sung in a pitch-perfectly haunting style, by a teenage girl that appeared to be a fan of American singer-songwriter and Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams, even down, eerily, to the dyed red-orange hair; except, unlike Hayley, this character's eyes were brown. If the setting were a library, I would say that it was kind of a mix between the ones at Oberlin (formerly Daniels, thanks to an unfortunate event in the news in May 2020) Middle and Southeast Raleigh Magnet High in Raleigh, NC. If the setting were in a mall, I would probably say that it eerily resembled the Barnes & Noble at the Triangle Town Center, also in Raleigh, as it's on the top floor of the mall. I even noticed some lost characters from dreams from most of the spring of 2020 to at least October 18th and 25th walking out of the place after the beautiful singing from the redheaded girl.

I couldn't tell if the girl was trying to sing like Williams or even Canadian singer-songwriters Avril Lavigne or Felicia "Fefe" Dobson, either, as they have distinct, completely different singing voices. I believe her voice was a little smaller than those three. Come to think of it, I think it sounded like a cross between voice actresses Veronica Taylor, Tara Strong and Nancy Cartwright; I have a memory of a dream from either 1990 or 1991 that had a screaming voice that sounded like a mix between the character Cartwright voices on The Simpsons for 32 years, Bart, and Nick from the 1989 Disney film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, portrayed by Robert Olivieri, but my four or five-year-old self was too young to process what was going on at the time.

I am also no stranger to dreams of girl characters that think they're Hayley Williams of Paramore. The earliest I can remember my first dream of a character like that was either in 2008-09 or 2009-10, where it was set in a school with creepy 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System/Game Boy-like music playing in the background as I saw a bad day at school in the eyes of a teenage character that had the unfortunate honor of being sent to detention, and in the room where it was held was a girl with that trademark dyed red-orange hair. The last time I saw a character like that was in 2016, the year my grandmother on my mom's side unfortunately passed. That girl had turquoise hair in at least two dreams. She never showed up again after that. The dream character with the turquoise/hot magenta-colored hair from another entry from December 2019 may have been also been inspired by her, but she didn't sing or apparently have any spoken lines, either.

Like I've said before, I don't have a problem with dreams that provide ideas for writing teen lit/young-adult fiction. I couldn't get anything done most of 2020 due to stress and anxiety over COVID-19, the news, etc., and I'll try to change that for 2021. -WM86/DFW