Dreams are a combination of pictures and stories that develop in our minds while we sleep.
Dreams can be about literally anything from something funny, to romantic, or even terrifying.
While 95% of dreams are not usually remembered, it is believed that people dream anywhere
from three to six times per night with each one lasting between five and twenty minutes.
While most dreams are never remembered, some people do recall specific details about them.
And on a few rare occasions, people have been inspired by what they dreamed of.
As a matter of fact, some great creations were developed from actual dreams.
For example, the melody for the Beatles’ song “Yesterday“ was inspired by a dream.
Paul McCartney woke up one morning with a tune stuck in his head that he didn’t recognize,
so he composed the chords for it on the piano and it became the music for one of their most
famous songs.
Another example is that of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry.
It has been said that many of his poems and short stories were inspired by the many nightmares
he suffered from throughout his life.
There are also several famous books and movies that were inspired by actual dreams, 10 of
which we’ll detail below…
10.
E.B.
White’s Stuart Little
The beloved children’s story of a mouse named Stuart Little was inspired by a dream
that E.B.
White had in the 1920s.
The anything-but-ordinary mouse was born into a family of humans in New York City and lived
with his parents, his older brother George, and a cat named Snowbell.
While White had the dream in the ’20s, it was only put into a novel in 1945.
While he was sleeping on a train, White dreamt of a little boy who looked and acted a lot
like a mouse.
He wrote a few episodes about the boy/mouse and put them away with the intent of sharing
the stories one day with his nieces and nephews.
But around twenty years later his story became a best-seller and even inspired the 1999 hit
movie Stuart Little, which starred Michael J. Fox as the voice of the mouse.
9.
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
In the mid-1970s, William Styron was struggling to come up with ideas to write another book.
That’s when he experienced a dream that would inspire him to write Sophie’s Choice.
He described the dream as “a merging from the dream to a conscious vision and a memory
of this girl named Sophie.
And it was powerful because I lay there in bed with the abrupt knowledge that I was going
to deal with this work of fiction.”
His vision of Sophie was that of her “entering the hallway of this humble boarding house
in Flatbush with a book under her arm, looking very beautiful in the middle of summer with
a soft of summer dress on and her arm bared and the tattoo visible.”
He felt like he had to write the Holocaust-themed story and in 1982 an acclaimed movie was made
starring Meryl Streep as Sophie.
8.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception
The 2010 psychological thriller Inception, a movie that is itself about dreams, was inspired
by actual dreams.
Director Christopher Nolan took the idea from his own lucid dreams for his seventh feature
film.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a talented thief who is very skilled at stealing secrets
from people while they are dreaming.
This new job, however, requires him to plant an idea inside the mind of a man instead of
stealing it.
Nolan claims that Inception was an elusive dream.
He said “I wanted to do this for a very long time; it’s something I’ve thought
about off and on since I was about 16.”
He also mentioned that ever since he was a kid, he was fascinated by how he would wake
up and then fall back into a lighter sleep but still know that he was dreaming, and even
manage to examine the location of his dreams.
7.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a novel written in the 1800s by Robert Louis
Stevenson (pictured above) and is about a man who has a split personality – the good
Dr. Jekyll, and the terrible Mr. Hyde.
It is said that Stevenson was fascinated with split personality disorder but was unable
to figure out how to put it into writing.
However, one night he dreamt about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “In the small hours of one
morning…
I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis,” his wife Fanny explained.
“Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him.
He said angrily ‘Why did you wake me?
I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.’”
Stevenson was apparently sick with tuberculosis and under doctor’s order to rest when he
wrote the novel.
He produced the first draft of 30,000 words in between three to six days, followed by
a second rewritten copy in just three more days.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sold 40,000 copies in just six months, followed by over 250,000
copies in North America.
His novel has also inspired several movies over the years.
6.
Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher
In 1999, Stephen King was hit by a minivan when he was walking down a road in Maine.
During the time that he was recovering from a shattered leg and a collapsed lung, he started
to have vivid dreams, which inspired him to write his horror novel Dreamcatcher.
The novel is about four friends who reunite in the woods each year for their annual hunting
trip.
But one year a stranger ends up at their camp, all confused and muttering about lights in
the sky.
The friends are then faced with a terrifying creature from another world and need to figure
out how to survive.
He was quoted telling the San Francisco Chronicle, “The first really strong idea that occurred
to me after the accident was four guys in a cabin in the woods.
Then you introduce this one guy who staggers into the camp saying, ‘I don’t feel well,’
and he brings this awful hitchhiker with him.
I dreamed a lot about that cabin and those guys in it.”
The novel was turned into a movie in 2003, which featured a who’s who of both on and
off-camera talent, including Morgan Freeman and Lawrence Kasdan.
5.
Stephen King’s Misery
Not surprisingly, Stephen King came up with the idea for his horror novel Misery from
a nightmare.
It is about a famous author who is rescued from a car crash by his number one fan.
However, he soon realizes that the crazy fan has other ideas in store for him that include
abuse and captivity.
King was quoted saying “Like the ideas for some of my other novels, that came to me in
a dream.
In fact, it happened when I was on Concord, flying over here, to Brown’s (hotel in England).
I fell asleep on the plane and dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed
him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig and bound his novel in human skin.
I said to myself, ‘I have to write this story.’”
And that’s exactly what he did.
He wrote the first forty or fifty pages on the landing between the ground level and first
floor of the hotel.
While his book was published in 1987, the movie Misery was released in 1990, starring
James Caan and Kathy Bates.
4.
Jason Mott’s The Returned
The Returned is a novel written by Jason Mott about an elderly couple who have a government
agent show up at their home with their son.
The only thing is, their son drowned fifty years ago on his eighth birthday.
The boy looks and acts the same, but there’s no possible way that it could be their deceased
son.
Or could it?
In an interview with CNN, Mott described how the idea for the book came to him in a dream
about his deceased mother.
“In the summer of 2010, I had this dream that I came home from work one day and found
my mother sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me.”
He went on to say, “I came in and sat down with her, and we just talked about everything
that had happened since her death.”
He explained, “It was one of these really vivid dreams where you wake up and question
whether it was real or not.”
He wrote a short story about a couple whose son returns from the dead and received a great
response to it, so he continued writing it and a year later he had finished his manuscript
which turned out to be a best-seller.
It was later turned into a television series.
3.
James Cameron’s Terminator
The 1984 hit movie The Terminator starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a futuristic cyborg
sent back in time to assassinate a woman whose unborn son will lead humans in a war against
machines.
Director/writer James Cameron was staying at a hotel in Rome while working on Piranha
II: The Spawning when a horrible flu and high fever hit him, causing him to have nightmares.
In fact, he dreamt of a chrome torso appearing from an explosion and dragging itself with
kitchen knives across the floor right at him.
He recalled when he came up with the idea for Terminator, “I was sick at the time.
I had a high fever.
I was just lying on the bed thinking and came up with all this bizarre imagery…
I think also had the idea that because I was in a foreign city by myself and I felt very
dissociated from humanity in general, it was very easy to project myself into these two
characters from the future who were out of sync, out of time, out of place.”
2.
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight
Twilight is the story of a modern day love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf, and
a human.
The idea for the book came to author Stephenie Meyer in a dream.
She explained her dream by saying “It was two people in kind of a little circular meadow
with a really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy and one
was just a girl who was human and normal, and they were having this conversation.
The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I’d be dreaming about vampires, and
he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how
much he wanted to kill her.”
Prior to being a best-selling author, Meyer was a stay-at-home mother who was an avid
reader but was never a writer.
At first, she documented the dream so that she would remember it with no expectation
of making it into a novel.
But after nine rejections, her dream became a reality and her story is now known throughout
the world by her Twilight books and movies.
1.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
In 1816, Mary Godwin and her fiancé, Percy Shelley, visited Lord Byron’s residence
in Switzerland.
During stormy nights, Lord Byron, who was a poet, would get his guests to read ghost
stories to each other.
One night, he asked his guests to write down their own horror stories.
After the request, this is what Mary claimed happened to her: “When I place my head upon
my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think…
I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed
arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some power
engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”
She described in great detail the dream that frightened her that night – the dream that
inspired her famous novel, Frankenstein.