people ask me where i get my ideas...

...and for me it works like this, and Sting says it better than I can:

"...The germ of the thing, and you work backwards from that. The procedure is very conscious, and very thought out but the actual lines that appear are really unconscious. I've got the germs of a few songs when I was half asleep. Just waking up...immediately have to rush to that piece of paper and write it down. I've read a lot about it. I've read a book called "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Koestler in which he scientifically analyses the moment of creative thought, where, according to him, the brain has different compartments and everything is well ordered, but in kind of semiconscious states those compartments sort of dissolve and ideas that should be in one place kind of seep into another and then you get a creative spark and something happens. And I would go along with that. I think that in a dreamlike state, you get ideas, but the actual hard work is a conscious thing. Once you get that idea you then, with a lot of discipline, piece it together."

--Sting
Hot Press, 8/80
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Most of my stories have started as dreams.