Like most nights, last night I had a Dream. In my dream, I was in a London office that I’d traveled to for work. I was standing in my manager’s doorway when a coworker walked up to me, eating frosted Cheerios out of a little Ziploc bag.

I looked at him and said, “are you eating frosted Cheerios?”

He looked at me and answered, “yeah, they’re crunchy.”

“But the whole thing about Cheerios, is that they are healthy, why don’t you just eat Frosted Flakes?” I asked.

“I like these, they’re crunchy,” he said as he continued to nibble his frosted Cheerios.

The dream goes on, I end up on some cobblestone streets, and I’m trying desperately to get to Big Ben. At some point an important female muckity muck takes her gum out of her mouth and puts it on my dogs back. I tell her that that was a really pathetic thing to do. In my dream, this was a pretty fantastic zinger.

When I get back to my hotel, I take out a pen and paper and start writing down my Cheerios interaction. As I’m writing I’m thinking about how absolutely hilarious that interaction was. It was so funny, and clever in fact, that I could use it as the basis of a TV episode. I mean, this is Seinfeld level funny. I could be a real life Marvelous Mrs. Maisel!

Then I woke up.

And honestly the first thought in my head was, I should Write that stuff down. Remember how funny it was? And as I replayed the dream, I was like, wait a minute. That’s not funny at all. That’s not even remotely clever! And I was a little disappointed.

In my dream I had it figured out. I was going to be a successful writer of a comedy show, written solely by me. What? It’s totally possible, right?

I am honestly not someone who believes that my dreams are telling me anything. Mostly because I studied science in college, and dreams have psychological explanations, and also because my dreams are super realistic. I read in them, I write in them, I have full conversations in them. They are literally like watching an episode of a TV show. I’ve always loved this about my dreams, but I’ve never felt like they were some sort of guidance or premonition.

Side Note: I read this article this week, and it’s really interesting, especially if you are a writer. I saw the referenced Batman episode when I was younger, and literally taught myself how to read in my dreams because of it. 

Today though, my dream prompted me to take a good look at myself and really ask what it is that I want to do with my life. I am three years away from 40, and I honestly think it’s time to start thinking about what I want to be when I grow up.

Whenever I ask myself what I want to be, and what I want to do, the answer always is that I want to be a writer. But what does that mean? I want to write a novel, yes. I love writing on this blog, yes. Do I want to write for a living? Yes. Do I think I’m good enough to write for a living? Honestly, I don’t know. Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Remember when I said that I have this idea in my head for something to write, and I think about it so much that a little switch goes off in my brain and I think that I already wrote it. And I’m so proud of myself for what I wrote, that I never actually sit down and write the darn thing?

Well, this madness has to stop. One of my goals for the year is to complete a novel. And as it happens, next month is NaNoWriMo, which is the perfect time to finish a novel. So I’m going to try it again this year. I did NaNoWriMo last year. Can you guess how it went? I’ll give you a hint, the name of the post I wrote about it was NaNoWriMo Notsomuch. But this year I will do it.

If I want to be a writer, I need to write. And if I want to make a living writing, I need to write something to make a living off of!

Also, I’ll tell you something that makes me very anxious to share. I have an article idea for the New York Times. An editorial-type piece. The kind that they publish in the Sunday magazine. And I think I could really do it. I think it’s a really good topic, and I have a really good story to tell. So, now that I’ve told you this, I am going to put a goal behind it. By this time next year, I will have an article published in the NYT. There, I said it.

This post was a bit all over the place, no? Kind of like a dream. It starts at a restaurant around the corner, and ends up in the mouth of a cartoon dragon with your hands full of key lime pie. Hopefully this post will inspire you as much as my dream did. You’ll finish it thinking about how great it was, until you replay it and realize it made absolutely no sense.

Do you have vivid dreams? Do you believe that your dreams are meaningful? No judgement if you do, I am always up for different points of view. 

The post My Dreams Are Trying to Tell Me Something, and They’re Liars appeared first on Ani Kay.