I’ve just attended a conference all about lucid dreaming, where I presented a workshop called ‘Wake up your artist! Lucid dreaming as a creative tool’. Fascinating conversations took place on subjects such as whether the ability to visualise goes hand-in-glove with artistic talent, how lucid dreaming can inspire original ideas for plot and characters, and how transforming dream images into art is a way of bringing a dreamlike lucidity into our lives.

Now that the conference is over, I’ve lost my voice – an odd outcome since the whole thing took place online, in literal silence (although it felt very noisy and lively): we had to write if we wanted to be heard. Maybe my voice giving out is a message that I need to be quiet now and look inward, after months of hurtling through the days with ‘to do’ lists as long as my arms and legs put together, due to moving house. Now, warmed by all the lovely dreamtalk, and forced into silence, I have begun to write stream-of-consciousness novel scenes; it’s all spilling out, characters are acquiring names and personalities, and the major events of the novel are jostling up against each other, waiting for me to record them and then work out how the hell they all interconnect.

Here’s a link to the IASD Psiberdreaming conference, which is still open for the next two weeks on a read-only basis.

It’s lovely getting feedback about Dreamrunner and it was fantastic to hear the reaction of Dr Carlos Schenck, a world authority on sleep disorders, who helpfully diagnosed the fictional Carlos for me and shared his expertise when I was wrapping up the final draft of the novel. When he’d finished reading Dreamrunner, he wrote:

‘You have truly written the “ultimate Parasomnia novel”. And it was a heartwarming story… you have certainly served the sleep medicine field very well, and in particular the area of Parasomnias, by raising vital awareness about this seemingly obscure – but in fact highly prevalent – set of sleep disorders that can wreak havoc on personal and family lives… I will be singing the praises of your novel.’

Often people only hear about sleep disorders when a horrific case of sleep violence comes to light, and there’s a tendency to think it’s something freakish that couldn’t happen to oneself. Sleep disorders often remain undiagnosed and so sufferers are inclined to fear that they’re losing their minds. Dr Schenck thinks it’s important to educate general physicians as well as the general public, so that such disorders can be diagnosed early on and treated before they erupt into violence.

To learn more about sleep disorders, check out Dr Schenck’s websites: www.parasomnias-rbd.com and www.sleeprunners.com