I’m thinking longingly of Chicago. It’s like an ache in my throat. I’ve never even been to the place, but it’s about to host one of the most fabulous yearly conferences: a dream conference where people connect through their dream imagery, spend days immersed in creative workshops and presentations, art exhibitions and special events, and end up at a rollicking costume ball where everyone dresses up as a dream they’ve had and dances the night away.

Since I can’t be there this year, a friend of mine has graciously offered to present my paper on lucid dreaming, synaesthesia, and sleep disorders; it’s about dreaming into fiction. Writers daydream books into existence, they draw on original imagery embedded in their unconscious and freely available in dreams. I love that about writing – there’s no end to creativity because new dreams are dreamed every night and can be expanded by day into fiction. Could there be a more fun career? OK, I know it’s not all just dream-fun but masses of hard graft too, but dreaming certainly peps up the whole process big time.

When I think of IASD (Int. Assoc. for the Study of Dreams) conferences, I think of the friends I’ve made and the dreams I’ve heard. I remember dressing up as a blonde hippie-chick for the dream ball; standing in the booming silence of giant redwoods in a forest in Sonoma; watching in my dream as a monkey woman gives birth to a smiling baby. You come away from a conference like that not only replete with your own dreams, but filled with the powerful, emotive dream images of others. It makes for a kind of turbo-boost of creative imagery which can split your mind so wide that suddenly it’s teeming with story energy and you can’t wait to leap to your desk and write by day… and close your eyes and swim back into your dreams at night. Well, that’s how it affects me, anyway. Do I sound jealous that I’m not going this year? I am!

Something to try: tomorrow morning when you wake up, don’t get up immediately. Stay in the same position for a moment with your eyes closed and think back to what you were just doing in your dreams. Even if all you remember is a shape or a sound or a feeling, that’s fine. Using your dream image/colour/emotion as a starting point, take a pen and write for five minutes without stopping to think. See what happens… surprise yourself.

Writing a novel is a great pleasure, but it’s also quite a responsibility: it won’t ever exist unless you put the hours in and coax it out from wherever it is. When I think too much about my novel deadline (which is looming pretty large and ominous on the horizon now!) I get flashes of fear – I feel like I’m pulling the story out of me on a string from some deep, dark place. Sometimes the string snags on something and it seems as though if I tug it too hard, it might break. That’s frightening. So then I have to walk away, go to the sea or climb a hill, take my mind elsewhere and let it recharge.

A lot of people have a fear of writing. Students come to me and say: ‘I’m frightened that what I’ve written won’t be original.’ Or: ‘I’ve completed my story/novel/poem but I’m afraid to try and get it published – what if nobody likes it and it’s a giant flop?’ I try to get students to write through the fear, break the ice in their own heads by using techniques such as flow writing (writing fast and wild, without hesitating), as this enables contact with the unconscious mind rather than allowing ourselves to be stifled by our critical, editorial function. Once creative writing students start to produce pages of writing and discover the knack of picking out the gems from the dross, their excitement at what they discover often effaces any fears they might have had.

I ask my students (and myself, of course; that’s the handy thing about teaching writing – it encourages you to practise what you preach), What amazes you? What hurts you? Where does the emotion in your freewriting lie, and which topics does your writing spiral back to again and again? These are the ones to work with.

Here’s a good start to intense writing: ‘My greatest fear is…’ Now write without stopping for eight minutes. Be prepared for anything. Some people say they can only work with fear driving them forward. I think of it in two ways: Either fear is what makes the story remain embedded in its deep, dark place, in which case, chase it away, or else fear is the beating red heart of the story, in which case, let’s write about it!