Do you listen to your dreams?

By which I don't mean your hopes and aspirations, but those nocturnal home-movies, the ones about fat cows and thin cows and ears of corn? How often has something you've dreamt really changed your life?
Or, to put it a little less drammatically, how often has a dream influenced your behaviour?
This is one of those questions I occasionally ask my students. Oh, the bane of 'conversation classes'! - teachers can end up asking the most inane questions at times, in the forlorn hope of provoking a response.The answer is, invariably, 'Never'.
My own answer would be twice, and the second time was in the last few days, and involved my publisher. (The first occasion led to a twelve-year relationship and the birth of my daughter, so perhaps that's a story I'll tell some other time...).
But before I tell you about this dream, I ought to backtrack a little bit, to give this story a context.
For the last ten months I have managed to meditate regularly for an hour a day. This has brought me many and considerable, if subtle, benefits; the merit must go to a wonderful programme called holosync : for years I have tried and failed to meditate regularly or have managed to for short periods but to little effect. Indeed, if the meditation is your kind of thing, I urge you to check holosync out (http://www.centerpointe.com/) and give it a try.
Anyway, last Sunday during my meditation hour, and for the first time, I found myself engulfed by feelings of frustration and anger, and what these feelings settled on was my publisher. It is now six months since I signed a contract with him to have my novel published, and in that time I have heard practically nothing from him - not even an acknowledgement when I sent off the completed draft at the end of May. Very occasionally since then, about once every two months, I get a brief email from him, apologising for the delay and saying something to the effect that now we are ready to roll. Then nothing for another two months.
Now I'm a sad little chappie (I guess that most writers are) and the prospect of having my first novel published is one that occupies a good deal of my thoughts. As I've mentioned elsewhere, agents and publishers can take forever to respond to wannabe writers, but once you've signed a contract you'd expect all that to change. But for some reason, it doesn't - or in my case, hasn't.So after meditating on all this for an hour, instead of the usual calm, I found myself feeling uncharacteristically cat-kickingly aggressive and resolved to write to said editor first thing in the morning, asking him when he intended to pull his finger out...
And I would have done so, too, except that during the night I had a dream. In this dream, my publisher and I were sitting side-by-side, working at adjacent computers. After half-an-hour's hard writing I decided - in my usual, lackadaisical fashion - that it was time for a break, closed up my files and asked the publisher if he wanted to join me for lunch. (By the way, so far I've only ever seen him in my dreams; in real life we've yet to meet. Hi, Anthony!). But he didn't reply. Instead, he stretched out a hand towards a tupperware box on his desk and took out a sandwich, which he munched on without taking his eyes of the screen. He's a busy man, my friend the publisher, a much busier man than I am. So rather than write him that letter, I resolved to leave him in peace, and trust that he'd get round to dealing with publishing my novel when his busy schedule allowed for it. After all, isn't it my job, as the writer, to get on with the next novel?
So that was it: the dream was telling me very clearly not to write the letter that my frustration of the night before had been calling for.
I didn't. Instead, I got on my bike and cycled off to a morning's teaching. (That's one of the beauties of living in a provincial backwater like Pavia: I can cycle to work).
And guess what? When I got home I found an email waiting for me. It was from my publisher: he's fixed the date - 'The Gift of Honey' will be coming out next July, and I can expect to have the editor's proofs within a couple of weeks.
Cheers, Anthony!