'Where do your ideas come from?'  It's a question most writers are faced with.  Of course, there's no fixed answer.  Ideas come from all over the place, a news item, a quarrel, a phrase heard in the street, a colour, a scent, an image, a face...or a dream.  

Escaping Dreams, is a first novel from twenty-two year old Bronwen Winter Phoenix from Dunfermline, Scotland.  It is about agrophobic central character Xanther Aerts who leaves his flat only at night.  When he saves the life of a stranger, Beth Elretha, he finds himself embroiled in a bizarre and unimaginable world - Beth is from the alien planet, Orenia.  Xanther must fight against the ganglands of decaying Middletown and help Beth save her once-powerful people, the Chaka, if they are to survive.

Bronwen has some intriguing disclosures to make about the source of her ideas.  And no, she hasn’t based it on her favourite sci-fi novels or movies. 

"I write from dreams," says Bronwen, "I have the most vivid dreams that sometimes play out like movies and sometimes they are highly complicated, twisted and even horrific in detail. They are emotional too. They can scare me sometimes.

"Beth's dreams haunt her every-day life...’ and hence the title.

"The action centres on a dying town overrun by gangs.  As the town grows more deserted the extremity of the situation brings to life the underground which holds a flourishing city, a city where Beth first found her new home.

"The story starts off quite dark but then light shines through. I tried to fill my writing with beauty as well as horror.

"Writing from dreams feels more like writing from a memory than something made up in your mind. It's like the story has already happened and you're just writing it down.

"My dreams are almost like a trip to the zoo on acid."

Bronwen's second novel, Nightswallow is already in the pipeline.  It is a more mainstream horror story which deals with love and death. And, she’s working working on a third project, Hobbes' Fringe.

My kind of writer – and an inspiration to all those starting out!

But I was fascinated by Bronwen’s dreaming and just had to ask her some more questions.  I’ve had ideas from dreams, too but they were illusory, fleeting things.

I asked Bronwen how writing from dreams works.  Does she dream in sequence, or in answer to questions?  Or does it all tumble out in one dream and keep returning in snippets of memory as she progresses?  Or is it just the story premise that she dreams about? Here’s her response.

"With Escaping Dreams, I had a series of dreams that were completely different and I wrote them down because they really affected me. These dreams are not like normal dreams; they are much stronger and movie-like, very graphic and difficult to forget, even through the day when I'm thinking of other things.

I managed to work them into the book and they sort of guided me with the story to an extent. 

With Nightswallow however, I had the most dramatic dream ever... it was so so so real and affected me in a big way. I remembered all the feelings, they stayed with me when I woke up and I couldn't forget it. It was a cold feeling in my heart - the dream itself was me standing against a wall in darkness, my eyes wide open and my feelings so far away - I knew I was dead. And then those feelings came back to me and a sense of panic filled me and I started to rise up the wall.

Anyway, you can imagine how such a dream would have that kind of impact and the whole first couple of chapters of Nightswallow was just that dream. The rest of it, I worked into my own tale. 

To be honest, I've even dreamt up a whole book from start to finish, just like a movie. It's a wonderful story, very subtle and eerie set in the Victorian period. So that's something else I have the option of writing, I just haven't had the time yet. The whole story is in my mind, just ready to go.