In 2009 Jane Teresa Anderson spoke at one of our first non-fiction writers’ groups in Brisbane, and we were all entranced by her intelligent humour, wisdom and kindness. Jane Teresa is a dream analyst with a regular spot on

Jane Teresa Anderson

 morning TV, several books to her name, and a very successful online presence. I came across a transcript of our chat (unedited) at the Writers’ Group meeting and thought you might like to read this small part of it:

Bev: “So you published one book and then you published more. How did you make the others different to the first one? How did you think ‘Well I’ve got something else to say’?”

Jane Teresa: “I liken it to when I had my first baby and then I was pregnant again pretty quickly. I thought I’m really pleased about this but I’ve given all my love to this child: what am I going to do? Am I going to share it in two or what?

 And when the second one came along you realise you’ve got twice as much – in fact you’ve got more. And it’s the same with books. You write the first book and you think that’s it, that’s all my knowledge. I’ve done it now. If I die tomorrow – and you will have this thought I guarantee you – if I die tomorrow I’ve done my thing. I feel really good. I’ve got that out there.

And after a while you think ‘Oh I wish I’d written page differently’. Don’t hold a book back because your 1995 book is where you were at in 1995 and your 1998 book is where you were at in 1998. And if you hold everything until you’re absolutely ready all those readers that you would’ve been selling to for 20 years, have missed out on your development and your message.

But nevertheless, to answer your question, I did the one book and I thought well what more could you want? There’s the results of my research on dreams and dreaming. But very quickly I had the idea that for the next book I wanted to tell stories of people who’d had a life changing dream.

 So for an analysis context just to collect and interview people I advertised ‘Have you had a dream that was totally life-changing for you? Would you like to tell your story in this book?’ So that was ‘Dream It Do It’ – we went with that one.”