As a creative writer, I gain a great deal of assistance from my dreams.

• The act of writing down dreams is literally a training ground for a writer. It is necessary to quickly, without forethought, capture multiple images, feelings, sounds and actions in some linguistic form. I am first, a story teller, and so I write the narrative of my dream in a story form. First this happens and that, and then this. I try and add as many details as I can remember, sights, sounds, colors, feeling tones, and who did what to who. I can attest to the fact that my writing became better and stronger after practicing with my dreams first.


• I have also incorporated powerful emotional dreams into my writings. The dream moved me and in a play or a poem or a story, the retelling of the dream as if the dream were the character's dream helps me tell the story more vividly.


• Images I have experienced in my dreams come back to me at moments of writing so that the dream itself isn't recreated but the metaphoric images and feelings help move a story along.


• In trying to understand the actual mechanism of dreaming, I wrote a play describing what I considered the purpose of the act of dreaming. See my one act play, Ms. Upright And Her Unconscious
• Most of my dreams are stories, with a plot, story action, and interesting characters. Most of my dreams can be the seed of a play or story idea. I now have over 4038 dreams recorded. How many years of play and story writing does that give me?? I'd go take a nap from the exhaustion of just imagining all this, but then I'd have yet another dream!! A writer's work is never done.

Plays are reproduced here with permission. This is copyrighted material and requires the permission of the author to reproduce any portions of these articles. Please email the author Bjo Ashwill for permission to copy or use this material. Standard royalty payments are required for any production of this material.

List Of Plays

• Ms. Upright And Her Unconscious
• American Woman
• The Demon Orange Juice Container From Hell