A Zombie Dream as Fodder?

Should we use our dreams as ideas for our next great novel?  I had strange one last night: I was on a boat, I think a fishing boat of some kind with just two decks.  There was the deck exposed to the air that looked like a miniature aircraft carrier - it was flat and barren except for what looked like road lines painted on it.  The fishing poles plopped inside the PVC pipes attached to the outer rim of the boat were so out of proportion to my fishing boat that they looked like toothpicks standing on end.  The interior was like a ferry boat with the bench seating under huge walls of windows and it was filled in the center with those institutional style flat black plastic tables and chairs bolted to the floor in two straight lines.  The working day was over and everyone (mostly men but a few women) had gathered on the bow to watch the sun go down.  Just as it kissed the end of the ocean, everyone started singing a song to honor the end of the working day.  After that, all these people went below decks.  It was dusky dark over the water and stubby candles had been put in highball glasses on each of the tables, held in place with some of the dripped candle wax so they didn't slide off from the swell of the waves.  I was standing on the second stair, enjoying the vision of the twinkle from about twenty candles reflected against the darkness held at bay by those huge windows.  Then, as dreams will do on a moment's notice,  the scene shifted.  It was the same boat but daylight.  Someone I used to be close to was sitting in the second from last booth in the rear on the starboard (right) side of the vessel.  He was bloated and fat and his skin was a perfectly pasty shade of grey.  He made short work of jamming a syringe into his neck and shooting himself full of heroine.  I was both horrified and so incredibly angry at him for doing such a stupid thing that I started towards him to do something - I wasn't sure if I wanted to smack him up the side of his head, yell at him, push him overboard...all those things or none of those things.  I stopped about half way down the aisle.  He looked up at me and the look in his flat black eyes froze me in place.  There was nothing inside his eyes.  It was like little kid night blackness, where you close your eyes when your mom turns out the light and when you first open them again as soon as the door closes, you can not see anything but a heavy curtain of boogie-man filled black.  I wouldn't hold the eye contact because it grabbed for my soul.  I was looking for life.  As I glanced around, I saw people sitting and talking at all the tables and acting like this was normal behaviour.  It dawned on me that I was on a zombie boat.

I wonder how many authors have turned a simple I-ate-too-much-spicy-food-too-late dream into a novel?  Aren't dreams supposed to be a way for your brain to process something or relieve some (un)known stress? How many of our dreams should we writers attempt to capture to use as a potential story line?  Instead of how many dreams, perhaps the better question would be should we use our dreams as fodder to grow something new?  As soon as I awoke, I realized the personal psychological implications associated with my dream.  However, I was also thinking (as writers can't help but do) that this would be a really neat zombie story.

Maybe this dream was not about what a hateful bastard that person-who-shall-not-be-named turned out to be.  Maybe it wasn't about a future novel.  Maybe it was just simply a way for me to look at things with a different perspective - something I wrote about a short while back. 

Hmmm, gotta admit.  I've never written a zombie story and Pride and Zombies, the Pride and Prejudice re-write, is really big right now in honest to goodness literary circles.  Maybe I'll expand my horizon and start out with a zombie short story.  Yeah - now that I think about it...this could be fun.

Woo Hoo...there go my creative juices flowing through my brain like an open fire hydrant on a hot August day. 

Gotta go!  I've got a novel to finish so I can write a story in a new style.

************************
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
- Stephen King
************************
See you Sunday, Skinny Sis! Love you.