Truthful Fictions:How Dreams Can Help You Write

This article makes a case for recording and using dreams in the teaching of writing. Calling on some well-known statements of Freud and on some recent research, I attempt to show how dreams can provide writers with a route to their unconscious. I also illustrate the role of dreams in furnishing writers with inspiration and source material. I provide examples of writing, both my own poems, and extracts from the work of Coleridge, Byatt, Kafka, Blanchot and Murakami amongst others to show how dreams, the experience of dreaming, and dream-like imagery have been used successfully in literature.