Creativity with Dreams

The content in Dr. Karen Petit's novels has been created from her own reality, dreams, and research. Banking on Dreams illustrates a variety of lucid dreaming techniques and shows how dreams and reality are connected to each other. Mayflower Dreams connects a protagonist's dream story about the Pilgrims to her modern reality. Both novels have interesting themes, plots, characters, settings, symbols, and psychological elements.

Whenever Petit has an interesting dream, whether it's a regular dream or a lucid dream, she immediately writes it down. This dream-writing process helps her to remember more of a dream's segments. Even if this author doesn't use the dream in her current novel, she may use it in a future one. Writing down examples of dreams also allows this author to see how the dream elements work together. She can then better create realistic dreams within her novels, as well as connections between a protagonist's reality and dreams.

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One of Petit's most wonderful dreams has not yet been placed into one of her novels, but she is planning on using it in the future. This dream happened when Petit fell asleep while thinking about her workplace. She was walking to work as an adjunct faculty member at a community college. She paused to say "Hi" to several of her students. It was a beautiful Spring day. As this faculty member and her students began to talk about writing, flowers suddenly began to grow from some seeds within her briefcase. Because of the communication and learning happening while the flowers were growing, the growth of the flowers showed the symbolic beauty of the educational process.

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