Dream Catcher-Upper

I haven't posted dream-diary entries since last June, due to a number of causes.

First of all my dream diary had gotten disorganized right around then. I would record dreams in a handwritten journal I've been keeping (my main dream diary is a text file on a computer). I would write hasty notes, reminders about dream content, and not get back to flesh them out. I would simply try to remember dreams, without writing them down.

At the same time, and very likely by no coincidence, my the content of my recalled dreams took a darker turn. They were more violent. I began to notice more explicit sexual content, some of which involved people in my waking life. I came to feel rather uncomfortable about the idea of publishing on the Web what amount to sexual fantasies about friends and acquaintances.

The violent tendency climaxed in July, with some seriously heavy stuff coming out in one dream that I remembered clearly, leaving me shaken, but which I didn't have the nerve to write down even as a sketch until the end of September.

I also felt uncomfortable about editing, about censoring, deliberately omitting details of the dreams from the accounts I might post to As I Please, or leaving the dreams out altogether. I felt like this would be dishonest, somehow. This discomfort fed back into the disorganization of my diary-keeping.

At length, I set out to bring my dream diary back into order, to get my recorded dreams into one place, with intact chronology. And after I did so, I could even bring myself to include the nightmare from July.

I was rewarded for this by almost two weeks of daily dream recollections, all included in the dream diary.

And now it's time to bring my dreams back into this blog. I'm not going to include everything – no one needs to know precisely which famous fantasy writer I've been soul-kissing in my sleep. But I will be posting dream-diary excerpts here from time to time, intending to get more-or-less current.