Writer's Block
So you're blocked. . . But don't panic! Sleep on it. And get inspired by writers past and present who have let dreams be their muse.
Dream Imagery and Metaphor
Clive Barker, author of Abarat and Weaveworld, recalls dreaming of a powerful image of strawberries at a Soho market: “the whole place was somehow sexualized by the smell and the sight of these strawberries” (Epel 33). The fruit peddlers sorted out the rotting strawberries from the good ones, and the overpowering stench conjured up a “visceral dark image.” 
Fusing strawberries and sex into a powerful, sensuous metaphor, Barker was inspired to write “The Age of Desire.” The short story is about a man who becomes a guinea pig for a new aphrodisiac and it leads him to a wild state where everything in his world becomes a sexual image. Eventually the exhausted protagonist dies “of an excess of pleasure” (33).
Writing as a hypnagogic state
The Beat writer Jack Kerouac published a sequel to On the Road and The Subterraneans composed entirely from his dream diary. Book of Dreams continues the story of Sal Paradise (aka Jack Kerouac), Dean Moriarty and other characters from On the Road and The Subterraneans in what the author describes as “weird new dream situations.” Kerouac intended the book not to be merely an account of his own dreams, but an actual novel. The book is a collection of stories, tableaux, and vignettes about his fictional characters and their adventures in his dreaming mind. 
“When I woke up from my sleep I just lay there looking at the pictures that were fading slowly like in a movie fadeout into the recesses of my subconscious mind . . . I got my weary bones out of bed & through eyes swollen with sleep swiftly scribbled in pencil in my little dream notebook till I had exhausted every rememberable item. . . I wrote nonstop so that the subconscious could speak for itself in is own form, that is, uninterruptedly flowing & rippling.”
REM Power
The mystery writer Sue Grafton tries to exploit the benefits of REM dreams by waking herself up at the right time: “If I am very blocked . . . I will drink coffee late in the day, knowing that it’s going to wake me up in the dead of night. So I get to sleep perfectly soundly and then, at three A.M. when left brain is tucked away . . . right brain comes out to play and helps me” (Epel 62). However unscientific Grafton’s method seems, it may be beneficial for writers to experiment with their sleeping patterns as well.
Read more:
Introduction--The Committee of Sleep
Dream Incubation
REM--Making the Connection
REM--The Royal Road to Metaphor
Hypnagogic Dreams
Writer's Block
The Little People
Suggested Reading
Links
About the Author