Exploring new frontiers of sexism: I'd thought that Hilary Mantel was man. Christ that's embarrassing.

My dream life and writing are entangled in slightly more complicated ways. I don't dream, or don't remember dreams, at all - unless I stop writing for several days. Then I promptly start lucid dreaming. So my choices seem to be, dream, or write - not both! :)

I'm an all caps BELIEVER in writing down dreams. Thankfully, I dream Rom-Coms, not Horror. Hmmm, I wonder if Horror was my bliss, would I have script-worthy nightmares? :/

I write down night horrors. Unfortunatey it's never as scary on paper as the terror that wakes me up. Audio visuals inside your skull really add a certain je ne sais quoi to a piece. Virtual cinema is going to be terrifying!

Scott, your screenplay dreams are amazing. Now, can you actually read the text, or is it that blurry "dream text" that looks like words out of the corner of your eye, but blurs into mud when you look at it directly? (I can rarely read text in my dreams, and when I can, I wake up ecstatic; on rare occasions I dream real sheet music, too, although sadly it's usually only a few bars at a time.) My dreams give me images and snippets that are useful for writing sometimes, but all of my life I have had horrifically violent and terrifying dreams that I would never subject other people to, even as fiction or movies. I write some of them down and trade them with a writer friend who has vivid dreams, too. I did "morning pages" (a la Julia Cameron) at one point for a period of about three months. My experience was that it really did tap into my subconscious. It's something I'd recommend to writers to try and see how you respond to it. I dream in colour (I gather not everyone does). And my dreams switch between first person POV and third, in a sort of isometric view.

I'm reading a surprisingly wonderful interview with William Shatner where he talks about writing in the morning: "...I found—in being obsessed by the show that I was writing—that the period of time between 5 and 7 in the morning, I’d wake up in a half-daze and was getting a lot of great ideas. My dilemma was, if I got up to write wrote them down, they were gone—so you can’t get up. But if you don’t get up, by 7 o’clock you go, “What the hell was I thinking about at 5?” "And isn’t that interesting? Because that morning reverie—when you’re half-awake and half-asleep—the religious people think that’s when God visits you. But in my reality, it’s that your mind opens up because you’re half asleep. If you open yourself to the creative thoughts, the jazz, the riffs, anything can be there. Your whole life can be changed by a riff between 5 and 7."