Fun Monday

AOJ, at AOJ & the Lurchers is hosting this week's Fun Monday. In the spirit of being interested in people, she wants a peek at our bedside table. (This is my favourite part of Fun Monday, how it condones and encourages nosiness. As a writer with an unsatiable curiosity about people, I am all for it.)

My bedside table is pretty standard pine unit with three drawers. The top is my junk drawer, the middle and bottom are my underwear drawers. Like a lot of other Fun Mondayers, books play a prominent role, although mine are more stacked around the side of the bedside table than actually on it. (Thanks to my slow progress through Moby Dick coupled my incurable book buying and mooching, I have about 40 books stacked up, waiting to be read.)

I would have to say that the most interesting thing on my bedside table is my dream journal. I've been reading and researching a lot recently about sleep and dreams. Not so much the mystical dream interpretation aspect as in using sleep and dreams to solve creative problems. I want to use this method mostly to assist in writing my novel but I've also found it works with computer programming and technical writing problems. Let me tell you, nothing makes you feel like a genius more than waking up with an answer that's eluded you for days.

My New Year's Resolution is to write in this journal twice a day. I write before I go to bed, to empty out my mind and list things that I'm thinking about or issues I want to resolve. Then when I wake up, I write down little notes or descriptions from my dreams. So far, I've gotten a solution for how to test a computer problem I was trying to figure out and a few ideas for how to better plot my novel. I've also gotten an interesting glimpse into my subconscious.

I usually wake up at least once during the night to use the bathroom. I've known for awhile that between that awakening and my regular wake-up time, I tend to have vivid, convoluted and complicated dreams, but by the time I was awake enough to think about it, I'd have forgotten the dreams entirely. Being disciplined to scribble some notes before I'm fully awake gives me some memories of what I dreamt about, although reviewing the notes sometimes recalls nothing and I wonder why on earth I dreamt about some of these things.

Now I know, there is nothing more boring than listening to a blow-by-blow description of someone else's dream. But I will share a few of the more bizarre highlights:
In my dreams in January, I've......

• Dug a grave with the devil


• Driven an RV with a guy named Flash


• Microwaved bananas until they exploded


• Seen on Kodiak standing next to a suitcase on a beautiful sunny day


• Watched a movie about a space travel throughout history - and the movie started in the 1800s.

AOJ wanted a look into my bedside table - you got a look inside my subconscious. Now go check out all the other Fun Monday posters, which are listed in AOJ's sidebar.