I often lament my lack of a tendency to remember my dreams. It seems like I'm surrounded by people who not only remember their dreams, but who, nine nights out of every ten, seem to have some new, vivid, and utterly insane dream to tell me about, either in private or on my Facebook news feed.
I've explored a lot of outlandish theories trying to make my lack of dream memory into something extraordinary. I wish I had some examples, but I did most of that exploration in my joke of a freshman writing class, nothing of which survived*. However, I now have a new theory: I don't really remember more than so-brief-they're-negligible snippets of dreams because my subconscious has a finite amount of dream memory that it was saving up for the insane, two-layer, matryoshka of a dream I had last night.
So, I was lying in bed this morning and reading. Regardless of time of day, I like reading in bed, but I can't really recall the last time I woke up and read in bed. Probably a long time ago. It was a thick paperback, engaging, but kinda weird. Feeling myself start to doze off, I put my finger down to make sure I didn't lose my place and kept reading. Then, I 'dozed off for a second' —though the evidence seems to suggest I actually woke up for a second— and when I woke up —for more than a second, this time— the book was gone. It wasn't on my pillow, where my finger had been keeping place, wasn't among the clutter on my bedside table. It just plain ol' didn't exist. It took me a few minutes to realize what had happened: I just dreamed up a novel.
It's too bad it didn't actually exist. From what I recall, it was a pretty interesting story, and, while I don't doubt my writing ability (my ability to focus on writing it, perhaps, but not my writing ability), I can't shake the paranoia that much, if not all, of its original charm, is lost in forgotten dreams.
So, here's what I do remember: It was sorta taking cues from that 'writer as an accidental god' genre, like Stranger than Fiction or Ruby Sparks. Zach (somewhat in line with that Batman the Animated Series Episode, I didn't read much in my dream about reading a novel. The only word I distinctly remember seeing in print is Zach's name, which is why I know it's Zach, and not Zak or Zack. I think my finger was on his name when I 'fell asleep') has written a very successful novel, and all his best friends are in it.
But then the honeymoon period is over. After everyone's initial excitement about his briliant debut novel, before too long, no one's talking about Zach or his quirky friends or his best-selling novel. As people stop finish the novel and talking about it, Zach's friends start to fade away, Back To The Future-style. When he realizes the correlation between his writing and his friends' existence, Zach scrambles to bring them back by writing a sequel, but he may have lost too much of them as they faded away...
*Wait, I think one of them was my subconscious being a massive coward after the months of nightmares that "The Tale of the Dead Man's Float" episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark gave me in kindergarten and deciding that not remembering my dreams was better than remembering nightmares.
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