Do you ever have active or interesting dreams where you wake up suddenly in the middle of the night and remember something about the dream you were just having that seemed somehow inspirational? Of course, you go back to sleep and in the morning you can’t remember what it is you thought might save mankind. So you put a notebook and pencil on your bedside table, to record anything you might come up with in your sleep. I mean, it might be important, right? So naturally you don’t want to forget it next time it happens.
I woke up one night with this great idea for a writing project I was sure would win me some sort of important prize... Pulitzer, here I come. So I carefully wrote down a key word I thought would surely bring the whole wonderful thing back to me when I read it in the morning. Well, I got up and did my bathroom thing. Then I went back to the bedroom to get dressed, saw the notebook and vaguely remembered writing something in it. Eagerly I flipped the pages until I came to the one I’d written this no doubt pithy key word on. “Clouds,” it said. “Clouds?” I repeated out loud, perplexed. Wha...?? Now just what was “clouds” supposed to mean? Not to give up too easily, I went to the door and looked outside. The sky was blue and cloudless. Some help that was. I tried to imagine clouds in the sky, figuring I might somehow conjure the inspiring image that had been given to me in the night. I closed my eyes and really tried to come up with something... um... cloudy? Nope. Only thing that was cloudy was my brain. I made coffee.
Of course, I didn’t give up on the idea of capturing some inspiration right away. I stubbornly kept that notebook and pencil by my bed and I actually wrote things in it a few more times. But the results were pretty much the same, only instead of “clouds” it was something equally enlightening, like “waves” or “bare trees” or “tickertape joking.” (No kidding... apparently I wrote a prize-winning joke on tickertape in my sleep. I woke up actually laughing.) But all I’ve ever managed to come up with in the morning is the possibility that sometimes I have really fascinating dreams. Too bad I so seldom remember them.
I woke up one night with this great idea for a writing project I was sure would win me some sort of important prize... Pulitzer, here I come. So I carefully wrote down a key word I thought would surely bring the whole wonderful thing back to me when I read it in the morning. Well, I got up and did my bathroom thing. Then I went back to the bedroom to get dressed, saw the notebook and vaguely remembered writing something in it. Eagerly I flipped the pages until I came to the one I’d written this no doubt pithy key word on. “Clouds,” it said. “Clouds?” I repeated out loud, perplexed. Wha...?? Now just what was “clouds” supposed to mean? Not to give up too easily, I went to the door and looked outside. The sky was blue and cloudless. Some help that was. I tried to imagine clouds in the sky, figuring I might somehow conjure the inspiring image that had been given to me in the night. I closed my eyes and really tried to come up with something... um... cloudy? Nope. Only thing that was cloudy was my brain. I made coffee.
Of course, I didn’t give up on the idea of capturing some inspiration right away. I stubbornly kept that notebook and pencil by my bed and I actually wrote things in it a few more times. But the results were pretty much the same, only instead of “clouds” it was something equally enlightening, like “waves” or “bare trees” or “tickertape joking.” (No kidding... apparently I wrote a prize-winning joke on tickertape in my sleep. I woke up actually laughing.) But all I’ve ever managed to come up with in the morning is the possibility that sometimes I have really fascinating dreams. Too bad I so seldom remember them. 
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