Do you ever dream about celebrities?
I've heard it's pretty common for some people to dream about movie and TV stars. Certainly, I've had that one about Brad Pitt (which actually included his brother Doug... have you ever seen a picture of Doug Pitt? He's actually a fairly good looking guy, but his brother is Brad Pitt, so standing next to Brad he looks like a schlub.) I've also dreamed that I was a pilot on Battlestar Galactica, complete with SciFi Channel CGI effects.
That all seems pretty normal to me.
Lately -- okay, really since becoming a science fiction professional in '01-- I've also started dreaming about, well, SF/F celebrities. Neil Gaiman visits my subconscious a lot. If you've ever been to a convention party where I'm in that sort of mood, you may have heard me tell the first rather embarrassing dream I had that involved Gaiman. It's not really repeatable here mostly because this is a public forum and I would absolutely DIE if it got back to him. But, you know, ask me if you see me and I'll happily tell you all the gory details (unless of course you happen to BE Neil Gaiman, in which case I will deny all knowledge of this).
Anyway, Gaiman has mutated over the years to represent fame -- particularly the fame I have yet to achieve. This association has been fueled by my son's strange attachment to Gaiman. When Mason was quite little, perhaps a year and a half, he imprinted on a picture of Neil that appeared on the cover of LOCUS. He actually carried it around with him and wanted us to play peek-a-boo with Gaiman's face. It was very odd, and, perhaps not surprisingly, Gaiman became a feature in my own mind as well.
I wrote over on my LiveJournal about a dream I had last night which involved another local writing celebrity -- actually several, and that made me wonder how *I* would feel if I stumbled across a post like this where someone dreamed about ME. And it made me think about the public life of a writer in general, because, as I confess in the other post, I have created in my own mind rather complicated relationships with people I really don't know at all. But because they've achieved a certain amount of fame in our community, I react to them in ways that are fraught with meaning -- both in my real life (tm) and in dream-time.
Weird, huh?
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5 comments:
Yeah,I had a dream last year where I was providing hospitality for Jay Lake while he was in town, and where I was trying to make coffee for him in the morning before we had to get going. I've never even met Jay.
He stumbled across it and noted that I could feel safe that it wasn't him--he doesn't drink coffee.
I imagine the feeling of having folks talk about meeting you in a dream is as strange as when someone gets angry at you for something "you" did in their dream. Dude, chll--it's not real.
The new checklist for aspiring SF authors:
1- Get agent.
2- Get published.
3- Get on NYT Bestsellers List.
4- Guest of Honor at con.
5- Win a Hugo/Nebula.
6- Get into Lyda Morehouse’s dreams.
Dreams are the weirdest but coolest things. The border-crossing part of your dream sounds like something that I would dream about! I never seem to have "normal" dreams, but they're always actiony/violent. I do dream about celebrities sometimes, usually actors, sometimes film composers. No writers, alas.
My brain regularly uses celebrities for central casting, but usually they are from some old TV show buried in my subconscious. However, Eizabeth Bear showed up in a dream recently as a sort of cool-person-extra in the dream . . .it was nice to see her there. LOL.
Scully and Mulder are the closest I've come to celebrities in my dreams - most non-people-I-know folks in my dreams are fictional characters.
Mason's imprinting on the Neil Gaiman photo is one of the cutest stories I've ever read!
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