Jul 22

Jul 22 Sweet Book Dreams for a Sweet Book Life

Some book quotes just stick with you. I remember one in particular from Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver that really stuck with me: a character said, "Animals dream about the things they do in the day time just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

I don't know that that's always true. I live a pretty sweet life, yet last night I dreamed I was in my great-grandmother's old house having a knife fight with Bellatrix LeStrange and Professor Snape while my grandparents, who lived across the street, were finding the perfect cat to bring home from the humane society. Why I'd be having a knife fight with wizards, I have no idea, but I was winning and with every swipe of my knife across their skin, the wizards seem to age a decade.

When I'm not dreaming up storylines that could be turned into fantasy novels, I dream about something else... reading.

It seems weird that after nearly two decades of being a voracious reader that I'm only just now starting to dream about reading. How it happens is I'll be reading myself to sleep, as I do most every night, and at some point I'll fall asleep while reading. Then (I'm assuming because the story is still so fresh in my memory) I'll fall asleep and dream I'm reading the book, including dreaming about what is going to happen in the book.

Then suddenly I'll wake up and have to parse out the imagined story from the actual story. I'd be lying if I said this wasn't difficult to do at times. I remember once reading Virginia Woolf, which is trippy to begin with, falling asleep and dreaming all sorts of fantastical things, then not even bothering to parse out the story from my imagination before writing an essay on the book for a class. I figured that as flighty as Woolf's novels are, there's not a whole lot I could dream up that would make it be any less sensical than it already is.

I started wondering if my sudden dreaming about reading was normal, and like a sign from the universe I got on Twitter and saw a tweet from my friend Sarah Woodall. She likes to sew, and her husband had informed her that morning that she'd woken him up by attempting to sew in her sleep.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Perhaps those words are truer than I initially thought and Barbara Kingsolver knows something about life that I hadn't previously discovered. But whatever it is, I'm glad I'm living a sweet enough life that I can read in my waking hours and in my sleeping hours.

This, consequently, also makes me think twice about ever reading thrillers, horrors, or murder mysteries. Knife fighting with wizards is weird enough.