HW6: Dreaming Towards an Ideal Career Path

            "I've always used dreams the way you'd use mirrors to look at something you couldn't see head-on, the way that you use a mirror to look at your hair in the back. To me that's what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are a way that people's minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the answers to their problems in symbolic language."

• - Stephen King
     (In an interview with Naomi Epel for her book Writers
     Dreaming)

genio.virgilio.it

Dreams have been accountable for causing very significant events in history. The historical works of dreams involve innovative breakthroughs, decision-making, and notable precognitions. These phenomena have been arduously interpreted by numerous dream researchers and experts. These include the Frankenstein, the Beatles song “Yesterday”, and the dream-based writings of the novelist Stephen King.

As one of the most read novel of all time, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has gained fame in every part of the world. The novel’s entertaining plots are not only limited within its contents, but also beyond them: the mystical origin of the novel. According to the brilliantdreams.com, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has narrated the background of the novel, how she come up with such a brilliant story, in the introduction of the Frankenstein. As Mary Shelley described, in the summer of 1816, while she was still nineteen years old, she and her lover visited a poet named Lord Byron who challenged them, together with the other guests, to write their own ghost stories. While Mary was working on her own story, she fell into a vision with her eyes shut. “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.” (www.brilliantdreams.com)

http://wetoldyouwhattodream.blogspot.com

She woke up in terror. The dreamed idea kept running inside her mind and the repetition of such memory kept on frightening her. While trying to deviate her attention to something else in order to get rid of that fearful dream, the ghost story recurred to her. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the specter which had haunted me in my midnight pillow,” Mary Shelley wrote in the novel’s introduction. And that lead to her Frankenstein, an artistically written dream-based story.

Another dream-credited career was Paul McCartney’s. As one of the most famous singers and songwriters of all time, Paul McCartney has gained popularity in every man’s melody across the world. According to the said site, Paul McCartney was staying in an attic room of his family’s house on Wimpole Street when he dreamed of a sound of a classical string ensemble playing a lovely tune. When he woke up, he tried to put the lovely tune into musical notes through the use of the piano next to him. Then, gradually, he finished the tune with all the chords needed to produce each of its sound, and that lead to the most performed song in the world entitled “Yesterday”.

http://yesterday-the-beatles.blogspot.com/

Paul McCartney was amazed with the music he came up with for his band, the Beatles. He admitted that he has not written anything like that before, but what was magnificent was that he had the tune, and that made the magic worked. Truly, dreams served as the way towards the revelation of genius ideas. But what is magnificent in those dreams is not the revelation, but the application. Many accounts have proven that dreams do have a purpose, and that the dreamer’s responsibility is to live with that purpose.

            Another career accounted to dreams is Stephen Kings’ road towards success. The novelist credited some of his works to his dreams. Stephen King is well-known in the field of horror novels, and the miseries prevalent in his works were not inspired by real-life incidents, but rather, by dream-based stories. In an interview with Stan Nichollsfor the SFX Magazine, Stephen said that while he was on a plane, he dreamed about a woman who held a writer captive and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains of the writer to her pig and bound his novel in his own skin.

www.eternalnight.co.uk

“I said to myself, 'I have to write this story.' Of course, the plot changed quite a bit in the telling. But I wrote the first forty or fifty pages right on the landing here, between the ground floor and the first floor of the hotel." (www.brilliantdreams.com)

As Stephen has put it into words during the interview, he said that for him as a writer, dreaming is like seeing something on the street which can add up to his fiction. “Writers are scavengers by nature," Stephen said. Dreams do provide solutions and teach some points on certain aspects of a person’s life, but they do not offer these things for no reason. Dreams make known to a person all the things that he needs to be aware of, and one’s task is to apply these things. Finally, after the application, the history will write the dreamer’s story.