When I wak'd I cried to dream again....

I can't help feeling the pressure to start something, to embark, now that the new year is here, even though it is a Bank Holiday (still) and part of me is in a dreamlike not-quite-ready-to-get-back-to-work state.

Hmmm. Dreams.  Now there's a thought...

Dreams can be the perfect gateway to a story. I wish I were the kind of person who efficiently went to sleep with a pen and writing pad beside her bed, ready to jot down fragments of them the moment I woke up (rather than squinting at the alarm clock before putting my head back under the duvet).  I know that dreams can play a significant part in psychoanalysis and therapy, but they shouldn't be overlooked as a source of writing material. I remember dreaming that my mother was baking daffodils in the oven.  It's a picture which has stayed with me for years and I haven't yet found a place to use it, but I know that one day I shall. It's the kind of weird, fragile, eloquent, unravelable image that could easily lead on to a poem, or a short story, or the opening of a novel.

On the day the Chilean miners were released from their underground captivity, I woke from a dream that left me without any sense of narrative or story, but full of feelings of pressure, compression, suffocation, proximity, bodies - a whole string of associations that quickly gave rise to some ideas for a plot, even though there wasn't one there to begin with.  And I did get up, and pad around and find a pen and paper, and I've written all those thoughts down, and there they are, waiting until I'm ready for them.