Friday, March 25, 2016

I Dreamed a Dream

Crazy weekend is upon me, with a church service tonight and three on Sunday. I have a reading in tonight's service, and I had an anxiety dream about it last night, which is weird because I don't generally get any kind of stage fright for reading or speaking, only music. In my dream, I was trying to do the reading for someone, and then someone else approached that person and they started a conversation while I was trying to read. I held my place and waited for them to finish before resuming. And then it happened again, but that time I just walked away while they were talking.

Come to think of it, that sounds more like anxiety about not being heard or listened to than about the act of reading itself, and I doubt it's really about this particular reading. It's probably more career-related, feeling invisible and unheard in the industry. At any rate, I still need to practice this reading a bit before tonight.

I also dreamed about school book orders, probably because I placed an Amazon order yesterday. That's almost like the adult version of a book order, only instead of getting a poster when you order a certain number of things, you get free shipping. A good chunk of my childhood and teen library came from school book orders. It was like Christmas when the order came in, but then I had to go through the whole school day before I could get home and dig into my new books. Now they arrive on my doorstep, or sometimes in my mailbox. This order wasn't so much "fun" reading. I got a book on playing the harp and a book on music theory, since I never learned much about keys and chords and that's pretty essential for using a stringed instrument as accompaniment.

The rest of the weekend, I will be reading frantically because I want to read as much as possible from the Nebula Awards ballot before the voting deadline next week. I may not get to all the novels, but I can at least try to read a little and keep reading the ones I like. I'm finding it interesting how many of the novellas, novelettes, and short stories on the ballot use first-person narration. I don't think I've seen that much of it before. As someone who loves first-person, both for reading and writing, I like this trend. And at least one story I read yesterday influenced some of the imagery in last night's dreams. There was a vividly described dress in the story, and I dreamed I was trying to make it.

Wow, last night was big on vivid dreams that stuck with me. Alas, no solid story ideas in any of them. Like I need more story ideas.

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