Only In Dreams.

I wonder if this has been done:

I recorded, via a digital voice recorder my sister gave me for my birthday, a dream I had this morning. I plan to make a short story out of the dream because it seemed like one of the most complete dreams I could remember.

I had a real Joycean moment when I woke up. In the foggy hazeglow of aftersleep, while the dream was still fresh, I had a conscious thought: "This would make a great story." Then, like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I scrambled out of bed to immediately record the dream. Granted, for Stephen it was a few lines of a poem that he wrote down while for me it was a dream which I spoke into a voice recorder groggily, but it nonetheless bears a connection--albeit a loose one--to Joyce. That's all it takes to make me smile.

It's funny because I related the whole dream holding the voice recorder while it was off. I realized the error after I finished and turned it on and retold it, so the story, when I type it out, will be twice (or thrice?) removed from the dream. That should prove interesting. The biggest difficulty will be to capture the mood because so many of the details will be forgotten--even now the dream is fading although I took precautions to remember it. Much will need to be filled in.

I will not record the dream here because I want to save it for the story, so to speak. What I must do now is type up what I spoke into the recorder and rearrange it into a surrealistic story. Even if this has been done before, it would be a fun exercise to transfer a (twice removed) dream from the images of the mind to paper and make a short story of it. It probably will not sound like the other stuff I have written, and I certainly cannot say "I wrote it" in the same way I write other things. I mean, the thoughts are within me, but they are also not mine at the same time. The story will be more of me fashioning a extant plot, like a sculptor carves out of a rock a figure of a man, or, to use a better analogy, like Shakespeare made plays out stories from Plutarch. So that should be fun.

I may have to hold off on doing that until next week or so, but at least the dream is recorded. I cannot anticipate how this little experiment will turn out.