Where the Unconscious Writes What Waking Can’t
Last night I dreamed I was a detective investigating a murder in a library where all the books were made of ice, while simultaneously being the murder victim who was also somehow alive to solve their own case, in a story that somehow made perfect sense until I woke up and realized I had just experienced the most illogical narrative ever constructed. My sleeping mind had written a screenplay that would be rejected by the most experimental filmmaker for being too weird, too impossible, too unconcerned with basic storytelling rules.
The unconscious screenwriter follows no known principles of narrative construction. Characters morph into other characters mid-scene. Settings change without transition. Time moves backwards and forwards simultaneously. Logic is optional. Causality is a suggestion. The laws of physics are treated as rough guidelines rather than absolute rules.
Why does my waking mind insist on coherent plots, believable characters, and logical progression, while my sleeping mind creates surreal masterpieces of impossible complexity? Why can I write nothing as interesting while conscious as what my unconscious produces effortlessly every night?
Maybe it’s because the waking mind is constrained by what it thinks should make sense, limited by what it believes others would find believable, censored by concerns about logic and plausibility. The dreaming mind operates without these restrictions, free to combine any elements in any configuration, to create stories that prioritize emotional truth over literal truth.
The unconscious screenwriter has access to the entire archive of memory, imagination, fear, and desire, mixing them with the freedom of someone who doesn’t have to explain their choices to anyone. The result is often incoherent but rarely boring, nonsensical but strangely meaningful, impossible but emotionally accurate.
Dreams are stories where the plot doesn’t matter because the plot is just the vehicle for processing feelings, experiences, and conflicts that can’t be resolved through linear narrative. The ice library murder mystery isn’t about solving crimes—it’s about something deeper that can only be explored through metaphor so obscure that even the dreamer doesn’t understand it until later, if ever.
Maybe the unconscious screenwriter is the part of us that understands story differently—not as entertainment or communication but as a form of internal alchemy, a way of transforming the raw material of experience into something that can be psychologically processed, even if it can’t be consciously understood.
Tonight I appreciate the unconscious screenwriter who creates epic surreal masterpieces every night without credit, acknowledgment, or coherence—the most prolific and creative storyteller I’ll never be while awake.
