Dreams and their influence – Thursday’s Children

~ Elaine Jeremiah

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Years ago I had a dream about a girl and a ghost in a big old house. Because it was so long ago, I can’t remember much about it. But it did inspire me in my late teens/early twenties to begin a story. I never completed it, but I did do quite a lot of work on it. The story concerned a teenage girl who finds an empty mansion in the woods, overgrown and dilapidated. She’s amazed and begins to explore it.

Obviously the story is fantasy, so I have the girl going around the different rooms which have different colour themes to them, particularly the bedrooms. There is a blue room, a yellow room etc. Then the girl opens a wardrobe in one of the rooms and out steps a ghost of a young handsome man. The girl is petrified of course and runs away but the ghost appears again. Eventually he reassures her that he’s not going to hurt her. He’s stuck in a sort of purgatory and is lonely. The girl and the ghost begin to get to know each other…

Well I won’t go further than that because I may return to the idea at some point. But it is interesting when dreams we have inspire our writing. Although I can’t recall much of the original dream, at the time I had enough to go on to begin creating this whole world where fantasy meets reality. Would the girl tell anyone about what she’d found? What was the ghost’s history?

I’m not alone as an author in being influenced by dreams. The author Stephenie Meyer was inspired to write her novel ‘Twilight’ by a dream she had about a human girl and a vampire who was in love with her but thirsted for her blood. To coin a well known phrase, the rest is history. I believe that dreams can influence us more that we think. We may not always be aware of it, but sometimes decisions we make can be affected by them. It’s possible to be warned that something is about to happen that we need to do something about. Dreams can also help us to be clearer in our minds what choices we should make. So don’t discount the next dream you have. It might be very helpful to you.

If you would like to take part in the ‘Thursday’s Children’ blog hop, just write about what inspires your writing and add your details to this link. Thanks to Rhiann Wynn-Nolet and Kristina Perez for hosting this blog hop.

Published by Elaine Jeremiah

I live with my husband and dog in the UK. I'm the author of four novels, my latest being a Jane Austen fan fiction time travel romance, 'Love Without Time'.

23 thoughts on “Dreams and their influence – Thursday’s Children”

  1. Ooo, another ghost story! My story TENDRIL features a girl and a boy ghost. They do fall in love, but things get off to a rocky start since he’s pretty angry about being dead… I love abandoned buildings (as my Pinterest pins will attest). Dreams are cool. My last one was about an exploding vacuum cleaner bag-I don’t expect to write a book about it 😉

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  2. I think I could gain a lot from my dreams — if I remembered to write them all down! Dreams can be so vivid, and there’s so much material there. But the hardest part: once you wake up, you almost immediately forget what you dreamed about!

    So for now, I’ll usually just rely on daydreams to get me by.

    Thanks for sharing!

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  3. Love your dream!! Please do write this!
    I’ve written whole books in my dreams—only to wake up and forget most of it. There’s also that half-awake time when I get ideas for new books or WIP. Love that.

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  4. Ah thank you. Yes, maybe I’ll return to it sometime. As long as I still have my notes and haven’t thrown them out!! But I think I could probably remember the gist of it. 🙂

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  5. My dreams are typically to surreal and bizarre to offer much in the way of inspiration, but I continue to hold out hope that one day, I’ll get one worth writing about. 🙂 I love your dream though, and I hope you write the rest of this! I love ghost stories. 🙂

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    1. Yes ghost stories do have a lot of scope. There’s so many different angles you can take. It’s nice to have so much positive feedback of this idea. Maybe I’ll revisit it soon…

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  10. It sounds very strange, but as a young child I had a reoccurring nightmare about being lifted up and carried off into the dark by a giant bee. This nightmare has inspired many scenes in my stories. Not in that exact form, but the terror I felt at that time–and a few bees and darkness thrown in.

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  14. When I was younger I used to dream a lot about houses – wandering through different rooms, and rooms that didn’t make sense a lot of the time. I love that this one really inspired you. Keep chasing that muse!

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  15. Lovely dream. And the different colored rooms–sounds really cool. I am ruled by my dreams, always have. In grade school we’d have dream-talk pow wows. Many scientific discoveries were realized due to dreams. Keep up with the story and sign me up to read it! all the best.

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  16. Dreams are certainly a big part of my process. I believe it’s our subconscious sifting through our thoughts and emotions and sometimes bringing to the surface what is most important and what we need to be looking at. Thanks for joining us!

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