The Joy of Dreaming

It’s my pleasure to have the prolific and much-loved Liz Fielding on the Dream a Little Dream blogathon, today.

Liz’s dreams are so useful! I wish I had some like hers. Here’s what she has to tell us:

I’m not much of a dreamer, either in real life or when sleeping. I have ambitions and they have to be worked at I find; dreaming doesn’t have much to do with it.

My night time dreams are usually frustrating searches in which I wander endlessly up and down hotel corridors looking for something.

Once though, just once, I woke from a dream, raced to my computer and poured out a whole load of stream of consciousness stuff that was the beginning of a book, not stopping until my mind had emptied itself onto the screen. I was in the middle of another book at the time so had to put it to one side. It lingered in the back of my mind, but the big question was, would it stand up to scrutiny when I went back to it, or would it just be one of those jumbled jottings that you find on the notebook by the side of the bed in the morning that make no sense at all.

The answer was no. I had this fabulous heroine, Jilly Prescott, facing down the dragon of London’s top secretarial agency, because she had a big reason for wanting to be in London. The man — you knew it would be a man — she had supported while he was building a career was now a big success; and too busy to call her. That scene remained almost unchanged in Dating Her Boss. (The dragon had her own book, The Baby Plan, not long after.)

Now, every night when I go to bed, I close my eyes and hope for another dream that will send me flying to the keyboard and provide me with two books. So far, without success. Unless the sandman delivers soon, I might be forced to write about a heroine lost in an hotel with endless corridors and lifts that go nowhere. But I don’t think that would be a romance.

To be in with a chance of winning a copy of a Liz Fielding book, comment to tell us what you’ve dreamed about that’s proved useful. Liz will choose her favourite.