How do you dream?

In college, I hung out with the artsy crowd. I majored in Creative Writing and English, my roommate majored in English, and many of our friends were writers as well. We discovered early on that the English department threw the best parties. And they threw a lot of them.

At one of these parties, a bunch of us were sitting around talking and my friend Julie made a comment about having a strange dream the night before. She shared the basic plot of the dream and how it had ended. Well, my roommate then spoke up and said that she never had dreams with a linear story line like that. Her dreams were always just different images. A couple of the other girls spoke up and said that they, too, dreamt in images.

Then those of us who dream in story lines identified ourselves. As I looked around the group, I noticed something, which I quickly pointed out. All the story-line dreamers were the ones who wrote fiction. All the image dreamers were the ones who preferred to write poetry. Julie then spoke up and said that she dreamed both ways. And I told her that made sense, since she was equally good at both fiction and poetry.

To this day, I dream in well-organized story lines. In fact, I've gotten some of my short story ideas from my dreams. And every time I do, I think of that party. I wonder if anyone's ever done a study on this? Maybe everyone dreams both ways, but the fiction writers are more likely to remember a linear story and the poetry writers are more likely to hold on to the images. Or maybe there is some fundamental difference in the way we think. I don't know.

Maybe I should conduct my own study. Anybody want to fund my research?

So, how do you dream?