Margaret Atwood

The worst dreams I’ve had are ones in which people I know are dead. Increasingly, people I know are dead, but sometimes they reappear in dreams, on hilltops or sidewalks or even on television screens, to assure me that there’s more to being dead than meets the eye; and I find this comforting. I’m told I am not alone: the dead often return in dreams. The folk songs were right.
-Margaret Atwood

Most dreams of writers aren’t about dead people or writing, and—like everyone else’s dreams—they aren’t very memorable. They just seem to be the products of a psychic garburator chewing through the potato peels and coffee grounds of the day and burping them up to you as mush. If you keep a dream journal, your mind will obligingly supply you with more dreams and shapelier ones, but you don’t always want that, nor can you necessarily make any sense of what you may have so vividly dreamt. Why, for instance, did I dream I had surged up through the lawn of Toronto’s Victoria College and clomped into the library, decomposing and covered with mud? The librarian didn’t notice a thing, which, in the dream, I found surprising.
-Margaret Atwood

Towards the end of her life, when she was already blind, my mother told me about a dream she’d had. She was on a canoe trip—something she’d loved doing—but suddenly no one else was there. It was totally silent; she was all by herself, climbing up a hill of bleached sticks. This dream impressed her enough that she told me about it, which wasn’t usual for her. What was she trying to convey? That she was frightened, I think. That she was sad. That she felt alone.
-Margaret Atwood

After she was dead, I put my mother’s dream into a story, which she must have known I would do. She understood, by then, what manner of creature I was.
-Margaret Atwood

source