Today, Tamara Kaye Sellman tells me how her vivid imagination is augmented by her dream life and how both inspire her writing.
It’s funny that I should sit down intending to write to you about how my dream life serves such an active part in my writer’s toolkit today. I just found out a flash fiction of mine has been accepted for fall publication. I based this story on real-world events related to a prescient dream I had as a teenager.
That dream occurred on the night of the day of the Jonestown Massacre. This was November 1978, back in the days before the Internet, when people still read newspapers and watched day-old TV news. There was no way for me to know this had happened until the following morning, when I sat down for Sunday breakfast. My family spent those mornings wrapped up in the Sunday Oregonian, which had only just begun to sport four-color ink on the front page, and only on Sundays.
That particular Sunday, the pictures of the Jonestown Massacre screamed from both above and below the fold of the front page. When I saw those pictures, and read the story, I threw up.
This wasn’t necessarily unusual for me; my parents chain smoked. Between the smell of cigarettes, pancakes, Mrs. Butterworth’s, rank coffee, and burnt bacon, I had reason enough to feel queasy like any other Sunday.
So I used that as my excuse for going back to bed because what could I do with this information? Share it? In 1978, I was a slight girl in a boy-heavy family; my thoughts and feelings were routinely rejected. I was always told I was too sensitive, I needed a thicker skin, I had a vivid imagination that might get me into trouble.
Fast forward a couple decades later. My toddler daughter, in her car seat, keeps saying something about a house we’ve just driven past on our way to the grocery store. It makes no sense to me then. Not until I read the news in the paper about a horrible crime committed at the very same house. And then what she told me made perfect sense: she basically knew where the evidence was. (Suffice it to say, F*ck yes, I believed her.)
Fast forward another 25 years, and the story I wrote, “Early Childhood Education,” will appear in the Lowestoft Chronicle this fall. It’s my third? fourth? fifth? rendering of this story. I’ve written it as a straight up personal essay, as a script for a storytelling festival, as a prose poem, as a full-fledged short story, and now, as a flash fiction. What’s been my problem? Figuring out how such a story might end.
No version ever fit until this last one. I ran it by my critique group; it seemed to work well enough, so I went fishing (that’s what I call submitting). And now my true story wrapped up in flashy packaging will see the light of day.
My dream life isn’t vivid in this way very often, by the way. Rarely prescient. I’ve had a few dreams that predicted moments that came true, none of them significant. Several involved loved ones recently passed, as if they were saying au revoir.
Now, most of my dreams come as little movies with story arcs. Sometimes I find myself in serial landscapes: dreamscapes I return to again and again, to experience different, fully formed adventures.
I chalk all this up to a few things. First, it’s probably just genetics: my dad and his brother had rich dream lives also, so I think it’s just something I
inherited. Second, because I’ve written and told stories my whole life, my brain naturally ascribes meaning as it happens in the events that unfold in my dreams. Third, I’m also a lucid dreamer, which perhaps throws fresh dimension into things, though I try not to mess with the stories that unfold.
And another thing. I’m looking at my new dark speculative collection coming out in July 2024 from Aqueduct Press: Cul de Sac Stories. Checking out the TOC, I’d not noticed until well after the book had gone to press those six of the eight stories in there either originated through dream narratives, or they actually use dreams and nightmares as plot devices.
All I’m saying is this: those nightly adventures you sometimes remember, sometimes can’t? That’s rich material, right there. Nurture it, even if it scares you. Even if nobody believes you. There’s a goldmine in there.
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Tamara Kaye Sellman is author of Cul de Sac Stories (2024; Aqueduct Press), the experimental novelette, Trust Fall (2024; MCR Media), and Intention Tremor: A Hybrid Collection (2021; MoonPath Press). She is the other half of the BENEATH THE RAIN SHADOW podcast with Clay Vermulm. Her collaborative horror collection with author Clay Vermulm, Rain Shadows, will be released in 2025. Other recent or forthcoming appearances include Lowestoft Chronicle, Lurking (from the Dark Decades Anthology Series), Quibble, Cirque, Turtle Island Quarterly, Verse Daily, MS Focus, and the WRPN Womens International Film Festival (her debut poetry film, LOOK UP, earned bronze laurels there in 2024). Tamara’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and earned other awards. She is currently at work on two novels (magical realist cli-fi and post-apocalypse), two poetry chapbooks (Pacific Northwest gothic and tributes to esoterica), a New Weird flash fiction collection, an inspirational essay collection titled RootLeaf Stories, and more experimental poetry films.
