(This is true.)
Not to sound too much like Donald Trump, but I have the best dreams. They’re fantastic, really. No one has dreams like me. Absolutely no one. Sad, really.
The problem is, I can rarely remember them when I wake up. I wake up knowing that I just had a fantastic dream, no idea what it was about.
However, there is one dream that I have had over and over again. For decades. It is one of the defining features of my life, although almost no one knows about it. Until now, of course. You are really privileged, dear reader. I just hope you realize that.
It’s more of a location than a specific dream, but I keep coming back to it and referencing it in dreams so often that it’s as real to me as, say, New York City. Actually, I’ve been to this place more often than I’ve been to New York City.
It’s a large warehouse or industrial complex, up on a hill with trees around it and reached by a long winding road. Sometimes it’s abandoned, sometimes not, but there are almost never any people there.
I first dreamed of this place when I was a teenager, I think. It was abandoned then, and I sneaked in and started digging in the floor. What I found was a large open space and then more space under that. There were man-made tunnels going out in all directions and further down and further down, it went, maybe forever.
Every dream is slightly different, but it’s always the same kind of place with empty tunnels and dark spaces going down and down out of knowledge. Just a few weeks ago, I dreamed that I was camping with my family and we drove past that place. I saw it up on the hill and knew it was the same place I’d been dreaming about for half my life. I wanted to bring them all up to show them the place, but we didn’t because dreams frustrate you just as much as they enthrall you.
Anyone who has read my (still unpublished) novels will be able to see this love of vast, dark spaces pretty easily. It is a theme that excites and fascinates me and make me feel that heartache longing, redolent of nostalgia and homesickness for a home I’ve never seen. I’m not sure why, but that’s me.
It’s why I love the work of H.P. Lovecraft or House of Leaves or Empire of the Ants. It’s why one of my favorite parts of Lord of the Rings is when they are in the mines of Moria. I am at home in huge, dark spaces. It’s what I dream about when my conscious mind takes a break and I let my subconscious out of its box, to play and plot. To dream.
The House, from House of Leaves (Source)
The Green-Walled Tower 
July 2nd, 2016 at 12:00 am
That explains Underworld…
July 2nd, 2016 at 9:04 pm
Exactly. That is probably one of the most blatant examples, although I didn’t mention it because only a handful of people know about it.
July 2nd, 2016 at 9:01 am
Most of the time I forget my dreams when I wake up. I think we’re supposed to forget them, part of the brain’s process. Once in a while, I remember bits and pieces. Do I ever use those bits and pieces in my writing? Well…hard to say. They sometimes inspire me but not any more than what happens when I’m awake. On rare occasions, they’ve helped me when I was working out something I wanted to do in a story but only in the vaguest terms. Most of that working out I did BEFORE I fell asleep.
July 2nd, 2016 at 9:03 pm
I’ve based a number of stories on dreams I’ve had, or at least they were inspired by one image I got from a dream.
July 4th, 2016 at 4:38 am
this is one dream!