Dreaming My New Project

The Project

I like online media because my neurodivergent brain can handle short articles and even shorter podcasts without a problem. Long-form writing is a challenge, but I was able to finish a short vampire novel this year, anyway, and have a sequel in the works. 

I feel good about those projects and there is no shortage of ideas for other books. 

The book idea I want to talk about in this post is a memoir about the dream I call the Spirit Dream and how it affected me. I don't really like the idea of writing a memoir, but I feel called to tell the story of the dream because of the difference it made in my life.

The Affect the Dream Had

I spent the entire decade before the Spirit Dream suffering one loss after another. The vision of a perfect family. My lovely home. The profession I had trained for. My extended family. My entire inheritance. My ability to write.

I wasn't diagnosed with autism then and didn't know that I was in deep autistic burnout, but I knew I'd given up. And then the dream came and changed it all. Not all at once, of course, but gradually.

My family regrouped. Finances improved. We moved into a new house that is much better than the in-between one. Those things probably would have happened, anyway. What wouldn't have happened was the life I now lead.

The Spirit Dream kicked off the spiritual journey that became the Mystic Review. It taught me things that mattered. It brought me back full-circle to the place I needed to be. Not the picture-perfect life I projected. My real life. The one that I was meant for.

It took over fifteen years to make that circuit and during that time, a lot of things happened. I went on some amazing spiritual adventures. I made and lost friends. I had other dreams that helped correct my course. I learned important things. I rediscovered my creative spark. And in the end, just this year, an unexpected synchronicity put it all into perspective. 

There are still more questions. Just like there will always be more to learn. But I'm ready to share what I have so far. 

Not my wisdom. Dream wisdom.

But that doesn't make the writing any easier.

How I Struggle with Writing

I have poor executive functioning and a lot of self doubt and when I hit the 10,000 word mark on any project, I start ripping thins apart. 

Which is part of the reason I started and restarted the Spirit Dream story at least five different times. Each version had a slightly different focus. One version was about faith, another was about autism, others were about me. And not a single one of those versions worked.

The issues were thematic AND structural, as my writing issues always are.

And then I started working with my dreams again and waking up in the middle of the night with words running through my head. The words came in phrases and paragraphs and pages—and one of the phrases was, "structure the book on the dream."

So I went back to the Spirit Dream and saw that I had divided it into five parts. This was something I'd done a long time ago to make it readable. Now it occurred to me that five parts might be a thing. And it was.

Sister Regina Kelly is probably shaking her head in heaven right now, but somehow I had forgotten Shakespeare and the five act structure.

The Spirit Dream, as I wrote it down that morning in 2008, had that structure. Baked in.

So what does all this mean?

The difference between a symbol and a sign according to the Jungians is that a sign communicates a single thing, while a symbol has many different meanings. Dreams are full of symbols. So it makes sense that I would get multiple insights from this most recent encounter with the Spirit Dream.

One insight has to do with theme and another has to do with structure. But the most important insight in my opinion is that is this is something I need to do.

As always, I will keep you posted <3