In our ‘Dare to Dream’ series, the team of the San Diego Writers Festival invites you on a journey. Hear what inspires us, why we put on the festival, what we hope attendees will experience, why we connect dreaming with hope and intentions, and what nudges our souls when we ‘Dare to Dream’.
Wendy Wong
Fun Fact: One of my favorite things is sharing my dream analysis sessions with those who wish to uncover their story
By day I dream about launching myself as a fiction writer, and I indulge in the magic of channeling characters and scenes onto the page. By night I dream about other worlds, other time periods, and people and situations that carry great importance, until I awake and I struggle to record the details of these dreams.
The more I keep a journal of my dreams, the more I tend to be able to recall. Some people use a voice memo, but I find that wakes me up too much. I use my Notes app on my iphone, and often I fall back asleep mid-sentence. For many days in a row, I may get only snippets, but even in those snippets the dream symbology can be profound and meaningful. About once a week or so, I record a long detailed dream with many scenes and some kind of narrative arc. As I practice dream interpretation, I usually find that my psyche is surprisingly clever and insightful, and these dreams often contain messages for my waking life.
Sometimes these messages are retellings of my waking life situations in metaphor, in coded symbols. Sometimes they carry messages from my spiritual self. Sometimes they are my emotional self finding a way to express how I really feel. And sometimes, they contain bits of inspiration for storylines and characters that perhaps come from the greater collective unconscious.
I dare to dream because as a writer, I am a vessel, a conduit for a crack in the universe trying to speak through me. Each symbol, each character, each scene is a gift to be mined. Creativity, after all, comes from the greater universe. We each are receivers. Dreams are one way in which we receive.
The San Diego Writers Festival is a community of people tuning into their dreams through the craft of writing. These writers dare to dream to tell stories, to share their memories and life experiences, and to become a vibrant voice in the writing community.
By: Wendy Wong, a Jungian coach and International Memoir Writers Association Board Member
