Yachats Oregon Writer Rick Schultze

According to Wikipedia Dreams are a “series of images, ideas, emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood though they have been a topic of speculation and interest through recorded history”

Now that’s the “official” definition of dreams but how many times have you heard the word dreams used in regular, everyday, sentences? “The Street of Dreams”, The Job of My Dreams”, The Woman/Man of my Dreams”, “Dream Lover”, “I’ve Dreamed About This” to name a few.

I’m not sure if there is an actual correlation between sleep dreams and reality but there sure can be a case made for some sort of connection. Perhaps it’s the moment you see the car you’ve dreamed about. The first time you walk into a fancy restaurant and it seems like you’ve been there before. Did you dream these things when you were sleeping or were they just coincidences? You can check out the scientific study of dreams known as Oneirology and the various theories connected with that but to me it still left me wondering, but not worrying, about why we use the word dream so frequently.

Of course the word dreams works great in songs, slogans, references to things, and putting a value on something like “it runs like a dream”. I suspect we’ve all had dream sequences of both the good and bad kind. If you have a bad dream about a job then get to work and it’s all too familiar there is some sort of connection. If you have a dream you landed a promotion and get one that’s another connection. Good or bad dreams are powerful things and ancient societies often ran entirely off of dreams interpreted by Shaman and village elders. They are things of mystery and never seem to loose peoples interest.

Personally I just had a dream come true. Several years ago in Yachats a woman taught a creative writing class on Tuesday afternoons at the Commons.

There were several of us who attended and all where novice writers who wanted to further our interest and skills by taking the course. By the time the class ended several of us, including me, decided we would try to work on writing books. I remember having a dream that I’d written a book and was at a book signing and chatting with people and selling and signing books. Well that was a while ago but last weekend myself and another alumnus of that class did just that. We’ve both written books since the class and there we were sitting at tables outside of Bob’s Beach Books in Lincoln City chatting abut our books and signing copies. My dream had been kind of vague and I can’t remember the minute details but it was about what we were doing and it was great to recognize that. Now I can say my dream had come true, I had a chance to live it out!

It was great and I hope all of you I get the chance to live out a dream or two and hopefully they will all be good dreams!

To reach Rick Schultze email yarick@pioneer.net