Stephenie Meyer2 June 2003

The meadow dream behind Twilight

A stay-at-home mother woke from one vivid scene, wrote it down so she would not lose it, and had a finished novel three months later.

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The dream

Retold in our own words from the sources below, not quoted.

Stephenie Meyer has written that she woke on 2 June 2003 from a very vivid dream. In it, two people were talking intensely in a meadow in the woods: an ordinary girl and a beautiful, sparkling young man who was a vampire. They were talking about how hard it was to be in love when he was drawn to the scent of her blood and struggled not to kill her.

She wanted to know what happened to the couple, so she sat down and typed out the scene, calling the characters simply "he" and "she". That scene became chapter 13 of Twilight.

Meyer 2005

Where the story comes from

Meyer was a mother of three young sons with no writing career at the time. By her account she wrote every day after that, mostly at night, and finished the manuscript by the end of the summer. Twilight was published in 2005 and began one of the best-selling series of its decade.

The story comes from Meyer herself, on her official website and in many interviews. It is consistent, precisely dated and unusually modest: she credits the dream with one scene and the two characters, not with the whole book.

How it has been read

Research

Dream researchers who study creativity find that dreams rarely hand over finished works but often supply a striking scene, image or situation that the waking writer then builds out. Meyer's account fits that pattern closely: one scene, then months of deliberate work.

Barrett 2001

Psychoanalysis

A reader in the psychoanalytic tradition would notice the tension at the heart of the dream: desire and danger in the same person. Freud treated dreams as places where wishes appear in disguise, and here the wish and the threat are barely disguised at all.

Freud 1913

Questions for your own dreams

Have you ever dreamed about someone who felt both safe and dangerous?
Is there a scene from a dream you still wonder about, as if it had a before and after?
What would you write down tonight if you knew it could turn into something?

Had a dream that stayed with you?

Tell us your dream

Sources

Every reading on this page comes from these works. Page references have not all been checked yet; those still waiting are marked.

Stephenie Meyer (2005). The Story of Twilight & Getting Published. stepheniemeyer.com (the author's official website).
cited, not reproduced
- Cited at: The Story of Twilight & Getting Published (reference not yet checked)
Undated web page by the author; the year given is the novel's publication year.
Deirdre Barrett (2001). The Committee of Sleep. New York: Crown.
cited, not reproduced
- Cited at: chapters on writers and dreams (reference not yet checked)
Harvard psychologist on dreams and creative problem solving, with historical examples.
Sigmund Freud (1913). The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Macmillan.
first published 1900
public domain
- Cited at: ch. III, the dream as wish-fulfilment (reference not yet checked)
First English translation, of the third German edition. Public domain; scholars consider it looser than the later Strachey translation, which is copyrighted.