You made me remember my dreams

I don't get a chance to be creative that often in my waking life, so it's always a relief when my dream life takes up the slack. I love it when I'll hear a song in a dream and think it's really great only to realize that it wasn't a song that exists. Which means that I wrote it. In my sleep. I'm sure that if I could actually remember these songs that they'd be terrible, but it's still nice to think that I can write decent songs, at least in my sleep.

Last night, sometime during the five hours of sleep that I managed to get, I had a dream where I went to a bookstore in Dupont Circle (which didn't really look like the real Dupont Circle, of course, and the bookstore didn't look like any of the bookstores) where a bubbly, makeup-smeared chick-lit author named Jess O'Neill was giving a reading of her new book Après, which told a story around the conversations that a couple had after sex. I was at this bookstore just by chance, but I was eager to see this author since my little sister had known her in college and hated her for some reason. Instead of a reading, though, the author was doing some exercise where she was going to be free-writing on a subject given to her for fifteen minutes and then would read it out to the crowd of women gathered there to see her.

I woke up angry but impressed. I was angry because it was four o'fucking'clock in the morning and I knew there was no way I would be getting back to sleep. But I was impressed with what I had dreamt. Après, a book around the conversations that a couple have after sex? That's not bad! I mean, it is pretty terrible in a cheesy way, but it's my terrible (I think), and more importantly, a completely realistic premise and title for a chick-lit book.

So with hours until I needed to be anywhere or do anything, I got up while I could still remember it and see if the stuff in my dream was something real I had seen before, but just didn't remember, or was my own creation.

The book checked out, at least on Amazon. No books called Après. Then I googled the author name, and this was really odd: Jess O'Neill is actually a guy, and he went to my college and not my sister's, and I never knew him at all and therefore have no opinion of him. So why was his name somewhere way at the back of my mind, and why did it get translated in my dream as a name used for a heavily made-up, made up author? So weird.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a public thanks to my dream machine. You do good work. I'm a big fan.