I Have Dreamed a Dream

© Karen Wiesner 2008 all rights reserved

"In dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d I cried to dream again.”
from “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare

A strangling had just occurred in the park. The victim? A dancer from the local scandaleux strip joint. When the local small town lieutenant, who’s longing just to go home to his new wife, goes to the nightclub to investigate, he encounters the radical personalities of the other dancers: one far-too-young-and-innocent; another older, vengeful and jaded; and a blond bombshell with unfathomable depths. What happened next took the lieutenant through a wild chase to hunt down, and capture, a killer.

When I woke from this intense dream, I immediately started writing. My pen flew over the paper as I wrote down everything I saw in my dream-movie. When it finally faded out, leaving heaviness in my chest, I’d filled pages with in-depth notes. I put the notes into my plot cupboard where I expected it to fade from my imagination quickly. Little did I realize that it was the beginning of what would eventually open a whole new writing adventure to me. Later, Christine Spindler (who wrote an award-winning mystery series and happened to live in Auenwald, Germany), a friend from a mutual publisher, and I started talking about writing a mystery novel together. My first thought was the dream I’d had about the small town detective tracking a killer in a strip joint while missing his wife. I told Christine about this idea gathering dust in my cupboard, and she told me about an idea she had about a mystery involving twin sisters.

When she sent me the notes she had on her story, I knew this was something that was meant to be. Without a break, I spent the rest of that day combining the best elements from both of our ideas, and DEGREES OF SEPARATION—a full-blown whodunit mystery—was born. Soon two authors who had never met in person were brainstorming non-stop from our ends of the world. In under two months, we’d completed the novel, which was so much like the dream I’d had I couldn’t doubt that destiny had brought us together. We both accepted that we wouldn’t want this to be a single book. We’d become enchanted with Pete Shasta and Danny Vincent, investigators for the fictional Falcon’s Bend Police Department, and together we plan to visit often the “small, sleepy Wisconsin town that owns more taverns than churches but fills both on the appropriate days. A place where nothing seems to happen...except the occasional murder.”

Since then, dreams have been a huge part of my fiction writing, in many instances for the Falcon’s Bend Series. “Blind Revenge” (FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, VOLUME I) began just as I was about to drop off to sleep one night. In my mind, I saw a woman walking down a hall. I saw a man ahead of her. The woman kept walking past him, then she looked back at the door, and he was looking at her, too. The woman went outside, got in her convertible, and a second later the passenger door opened and the man got in. At that moment, my subconscious mind turned creepy. Suddenly this woman was blindly kissing her stranger as if it was the end of the world. I knew that, for her, it was the end of the world when she said the witch was coming for her eyes.

“Fixated” (also in FBCF, VOLUME I) was based on a dream I had about a woman who was being stalked by someone. “Retribution” (which will be in FALCON’S BEND CASE FILES, VOLUME II) is based on a dream I had about a scantily clad woman temporarily inhabiting a property and lurking in the backyard. When I woke, I was in a Falcon’s Bend mindset, and quickly worked this dream into the idea that the subdivision Lieutenants Pete Shasta and Danny Vincent live in becomes home to a very hot young mama…and their wives Lisa and Melody aren’t too happy about all the men in the neighborhood moonlighting as Peeping Toms. But it isn’t until the woman disappears, leaving her two children alone, that Lisa realizes crime is firmly afoot.

Anyway, I think using dreams to craft fiction is brilliant. Is it a little...well, disturbing? Sometimes it is, but writers can always make lemonade out of lemons.

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Karen Wiesner is an accomplished author with 55 books published in the past 10 years, which have been nominated for and/or won 75 awards, and 20 more titles under contract. Karen’s books cover such genres as women’s fiction, romance, mystery/police procedural/cozy, suspense, paranormal, futuristic, gothic, inspirational, thriller, horror and action/adventure. She also writes children’s books, poetry, and writing reference titles such as her bestseller, First Draft in 30 Days, available from Writer’s Digest Books. Karen’s second release from Writer’s Digest Books is From First Draft to Finished Novel -- A Writer’s Guide to Cohesive Story.