Of Novels and Dreamscapes: The story of Once

I have recently mentioned the last novel I read, Once, by James Herbert. The entire storyline appealed to my senses of wonder and sensuality. What I have not yet discussed is just how close I felt to this book and it's characters. No, I did not feel a kinship to them because the story was set in England, land of my forbears. I felt so unnaturally enraptured by the story because, simply, I had lived it. Not in a waking reality, but in my dreams. Once I realized that I somehow knew the story, the characters, their personalities and appearance... not to mention what would happen next... I began to get curious. I looked up the copywright and found the book was just published in 2002. That is too new and too recent for me to have read the book and forgotten it only to purchase it again. It is also too recent for it to have been turned into a film. No, I am not recalling the details which come to me based on a film or I would probably OWN the DVD by now. The answer finally revealed itself to me - I had dreamed it, dreamed all of it.

Dreams take time to surface, even recent dreams can be experienced so passively that they settle silently back into the impenetrable abyss of your id. While reading the book, I was able to clearly picture the entire climax and finale... replete with such exquisite detail to the rooms, weather, mansion and people that it appeared in my head like a film. What's more, I felt emotions and thoughts... indeed even questions which were quite clearly NOT from within the confines of the book's covers. I was remembering my own first-person experience of the events as they unfolded to me in a dream. Of course, once I realized this I was able to 'recall' the dream from memory. I had unlocked it, so to speak, and this also allowed me to replay it freely behind my eyes. Stop. Seek. Play. Rewind.

It should go without saying that having 'lived' as this character in the past, reading the novel in the present made for a previously unequalled and intense encounter. Many questions were raised in my head. How do (or did) I know this story previously? If the book was published only within the last few years, how is it possible for me to have pulled its verbatim tale from the phantasm of a dream I have not had for quite some time? Does suggest that I had perhaps dreamed the entire story before the author had even committed pen to paper? How had this written text translated into unwritten context for a conscious waking dream experience? Previous to the last four months, I had not expanded my circle of reading since high school. I have always followed a series such as Star Wars, Battletech, Dragonlance and the like. It does not seem plausible that I would have picked a book at random to read when I was busy consuming these other collections. Likewise, if I had read the book before it would have registered much sooner. I would recall the writing style, the first chapter's every detail.

This leaves me with some interesting unanswered questions.

Who cares about the questions, though? I think I already know the answer. Actually, it does raise one good question... have I not often commented that I should write out my dreams because they would make excellent stories? Now I must wonder what the implications of this amazing coincidence are. Are my dreams some sort of plagiarism? I have often seen glimpses of future events. Could it be that my id has drawn upon the images in my head from some future book I have read and spun it into a waking dream? There are many leaps which can be made from this premise, but they range too far for me to follow logically.

I will leave this as having been an AMAZING experience. I can't describe to you what it is like to live through a novel first-hand, experiencing things in sequence but not quite having a perfect sense of context for what is happening or why.... simply that it is and you are subject to it. To call it magical seems appropritate, given the novel's topics.

Perhaps I really SHOULD start writing out my dreams. If these dreams are good enough for publication by a major author, then there may be a promising and exciting career in it for me.