Story Weekend: Dream a Little Dream

http://www.dreamstime.com/-image834184It’s been strangely quiet on Story Weekend the past couple of weeks, so today I’ll pick a topic I know we can all relate to: dreams. Have you had a dream that came true? A recurring dream you can’t shake? A nightmare you still remember from your childhood? Tell us!

If  you’re new to Story Weekend, here’s how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme, however you interpret it. Thanks to all of you who’ve been contributing. As always, there are a few “rules”:

▪   The story must be true

▪   Try to keep it under 100 words. Embrace the challenge! That’s about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it’s too long. I know how tough it is to “write tight” but I hope you’ll accept this as a challenge.

Can’t wait to hear your dreams!

 

18 Comments

  1. Sarah Piercey on February 22, 2013 at 11:08 pm

    As a child I had a recurring dream that continued to pop up for years. It’s actually the first memory I have of having a nightmare. In it, I could see two giant rats that lived under my bed. The rats would plot with each other about biting my feet if I stepped out of the bed. It wasn’t a long nightmare but it would always wake me up and leave me terrified for my feet. I would crawl to the end of my bed and jump from it towards the door, trying to get as far away from my bed as fast as I could!

    • Cindy Mathes on February 23, 2013 at 12:09 am

      Oh Sarah, what scary dream for a little girl…

      • Diane Chamberlain on February 23, 2013 at 9:21 am

        I feel for that little girl!

  2. Cindy Mathes on February 23, 2013 at 12:08 am

    Oh Diane, this is a good one. I dream all night long. Good dreams, bad dreams, dreams about people I don’t know most of the time. I told my counselor once that it is sort of like closing my eyes and the curtain opens and it is Showtime. I only wish I could remember when I wake up. Some times it feels like a movie, but I don’t know how to remember it long enough to write it down. Then there are the dreams that are relative to how I am feeling. I have severe leg pain at night. I dream I am looking for my car in the parking lot. I walk and walk and walk…I wake up in tears because of the pain. Or, I am climbing stairs, ladders or mountains. Same results. There are also the dreams when I need to call some one, but I can’t figure out how to get my phone to work, or I have someone else’s phone.
    You can ask my family about the one dream I have and what it means. When I dream about fish, this is a sure sign that some one I know or some one in my family is pregnant. Only once have I dreamed about fish and no one was pregnant.

    • Diane Chamberlain on February 23, 2013 at 9:23 am

      You and I share the all-night movie theater in our heads, Cindy. I often wake up exhausted from all the activities I’ve been part of all night long. (The fish thing is fascinating…)

    • Joyce Whitley on February 23, 2013 at 9:54 am

      I have these dreams occasionally and I call them Epic Dreams. They have a clear beginning, middle and end. They are usually stories that I wish I had the gift of writing so that I could write the amazing story about the full bodied characters, the amazing settings and the unforgettable characters. My favorite (but scary) one was about a black rainbow and how it came to predict an ending to the Earth. It was pretty terrifying but at the same time it was exhilarating.

  3. Barb Braun on February 23, 2013 at 8:13 am

    When I was a young girl, my sister and I shared a room. I believed that dreams came out of your pillow. So…. whenever I was having a scary dream, I would wake up my sister and ask her what she was dreaming about. She ALWAYS said, “princesses”. So I would jump out of my bed, jump into hers and share her pillow!

    • Diane Chamberlain on February 23, 2013 at 9:24 am

      That is precious!

  4. Donna Steele on February 23, 2013 at 9:38 am

    Thanks for the invite! For years I had the same nightmare and to this day I don’t know what happens but there are numbers in it. I’m doing calculations and counting and if I don’t get finished something horrible will happen. I do know that when it would wake me up, I’d be hyperventilating and have to talk to Daddy. They finally went away, until I met Hubby. It’s as though having someone to love brought it back. I called Daddy at 2 a.m. (and I was in my mid-twenties) and he talked me through it just like before. Daddy’s gone now, I sure I don’t ever have it again.

    • Diane Chamberlain on February 23, 2013 at 11:10 am

      I hope you don’t, Donna. It sounds like an exhausting experience.

  5. Jayna Lalli on February 23, 2013 at 9:50 am

    When I was young, my little sister and I just couldn’t get along. I had a recurring dream (for years and years!!!) that woke me screaming every time. My dream was that I organized for a hot air balloon to be part of our recess time at our elementary school (what 8 year old doesn’t have that kind of pull)!! The hot air balloon had an attached rope so that someone was responsible to let the balloon up to the sky and then pull it down again. My friend, Leroy and I (I actually didn’t know anyone named Leory) had a plan. He would tackle the balloon operator and I took my axe (IMAGINE!!!!) to chop down the safety rope so she would float away and I would live happily ever after… only as my sister floated away, she began to yell and plead for my help. She also screamed that she was sorry for the way she treated me and promised it would stop and that she loved me… in the days that followed the dream, I would try SO HARD to befriend my sister but it took several years for that to happen. Happily, I’m hot-air-balloon-dream free these days… thankfully.

    • Diane Chamberlain on February 23, 2013 at 11:11 am

      Wow!

  6. Rebecca on February 24, 2013 at 9:58 am

    I have been working incredibly hard recently on an academic paper (trying to get a job after 3 years off having my two kids!), and nearly every day I wake up with a clear answer in my head to a difficult problem I was toiling over the previous day. These aren’t vivid dreams in the usual sense – I wake up with a vague sense of having dreamt about working on my paper, but no strong imagery – but to me they are a striking illustration that it isn’t just nonsense that goes through our heads while we’re sleeping. Plus, feeling that important work has been accomplished by 6.30am is a great bonus!

    Yesterday, I’d been working so hard that I had lost my ability to concentrate, so I went to bed at 7.30pm and treated myself to ‘The Escape Artist’ on my Kindle, and read it until I fell asleep. It felt thoroughly indulgent and I’m really enjoying it! It’s only the second of your books that I’ve read (the first was ‘The Midwife’s Confession’) and I’ll be seeking out more after this. I looked up your site to let you know that you have a (relatively) new fan, and then you distracted me with the dreams stuff 😉

    • Diane Chamberlain on February 25, 2013 at 11:04 pm

      Thank you, Rebecca! Sorry to distract you!

  7. Margo on February 26, 2013 at 12:59 pm

    With a jolt I woke up with my eyes wide as saucers. My dream was so vivid and so colorful I had to sketch it before it left my memory. With Gary & Pup Kramer sound asleep, I quietly tiptoed into my studio and sketched the 3 different outdoor cafe scenes I would present to my prospective business clients. Little did I know they would fall in love with the idea and ask for 50×50 canvas’s to be painted in the most brilliant of colors. It made me believe that dreams really do come true.

    • Diane Chamberlain on March 3, 2013 at 2:34 pm

      love this, Margo, and love those paintings!

  8. Veronica on May 1, 2013 at 10:43 pm

    I was a preteen when I began to have a recurring dream that scared the life out of me. I remember waking up, shaking all over and wondering how something that was not real could have such an effect on me time and time again. Night after night I was doomed to watch helplessly as my little brother was gunned down like he was some kind of animal. The dreams became more frequent and I found my self dreaming during the day. Within a few months they came to an abrupt stop and soon became all but a distant memory. Years go by and I’ve started a family of my own when disaster strikes. My little brother was murdered in exactly the same fashion that I had dreamed all those years ago. I can’t help but wonder if there is something that I could have done that might have prevented this.

    • Diane Chamberlain on May 1, 2013 at 11:18 pm

      I’m so sorry that happened to your family, Veronica. I can imagine how haunting that is, but I’m sure there was nothing you could have done. Hugs.

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