I know it's super clique, but I get tons of ideas from dreams. I rarely remember my dreams, but if I do, they can leave a profound effect on me.
My first book was based on a dream I had, but only the basic premise and a single scene that I ultimately wrote to be quite different from how it appeared to me. This book was way outside my usual areas of interest and it was a bit challenging to write. Eventually the pieces all fell together and I had written a proper book (a quirky little modern fantasy-romance that is impossibly hard to categorize). Take away: don't dismiss the usefulness of dreams, but also don't take them literally. They can be just inspiration vs a detailed retelling of what you 'saw'.
Sometimes I've had dreams where I can lift things with telekinesis. My main character uses telekinesis, but I don't quite remember if the dreams inspired this or if I came up with it beforehand. Either way, I'm sure the inspiration came from X-Men. In other dreams I could walk through walls or imagine that I was invisible (which often resulted in me being caught anyways). Both of these powers got incorporated into an alien character with dreadlocks. Funny thing is, I wasn't thinking of Predator at the time. I've also had dreams of familiar environments being mixed up, such as there being a beach in my backyard, or doors that lead to rooms of other houses. I think some of these dreams may have inspired some of the familiar yet alien environments of my fictional earth-like planet.
I sleep through mostly dreamless nights. Occasionally, though, I have a super badass awesome dream. One in particular where I was in this Resident Evil 4 type small village, but I remember in the dream I was in America. Now I have a story, and while the whole story is not based entirely off the dream, there is a part where the protag group goes through a swampy redneck town in Mississippi full of zombies.
Most of my dreams are about me and the only thing that I really remember is that I can fly. It's so weird being able to fly in a dream, because you get that feeling of falling like you should wake up, but I don't. I wish I knew the psychology behind my dreams and why I can always fly.
While I was in Rome in my early twenties and sick with a fever, there was indeed one piece of writing that came to be from a dream I had, well more like a nightmare. It was an image of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire. I awoke and immediately began to sketch the image before diving head first into a forty page treatment. I incorporated ideas such as time travel and a future war of some kind. I later evolved the treatment into a full-fledged screenplay in which the heroine of the story, a seemingly plain girl named Sarah who was working as a waitress, had emerged. By the time I had gotten to the final draft, that Sarah stuck and by then I'd also fleshed out plenty of action scenes as well as a love story at the heart of it all. There was also that chrome skeleton of course, which would later become one of the most memorable villains in all of cinema. I called the screenplay "The Terminator."
Because you want to be able to, at least temporarily, escape your life and "fly" away from it. That will be $400 for this professional pop-psychology session.
It isn't too uncommon to have a dream and then write about it. You should search up "Flin's Destiny" by Erik Olsen. His story goes like this- He was at a baseball game with a friend and his friend dared him to eat a habanero pepper, he said "Sure I will eat six." One thing led to another and he ended burning a hole in his stomach and he went into a coma. While in his coma he had a very long, very detailed dream which he later wrote down and published into Flin's Destiny. It's a good book!
Yes, actually, and I don't think anyone I've told has ever believed me on it. I'm certain there was no chance at all I could have known about him: he lives on the other side of the world and at the time I dreamed of him he would have only been 11-12 years old.
For example: for unknown reasons, I thought that all writers wore black turtle-neck sweaters. Always. A kind of author's uniform. I made my mom buy me a black turtle-neck, because I wanted to be prepared for when I was a writer (didn't realise I already was, technically). Didn't think it through though, because it obviously wouldn't fit me now. Don't know how authors would survive in summer with those mandatory black turtle-necks...
I believed then, and still do to this day, that all writers have a special cigarette that they smoke after they type that last word. I already knew this, and thus - still know, that many of my favorite writers succumbed to 'consumption' (an old school term for alcoholism). They're not alone, many have. One of my favorite composers, Chopin died from consumption. When I was seven, my Uncle sent me - "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. He, my Uncle, said if I could write him a two page report, he'd send me a pack of cigarettes. I wrote the two pages, my uncle sent the cigs, and they were confiscated.... A month later, my Uncle contacted me to see if I got the cigs. I said, "No, mom took them." All he said was, read "The Stranger" again...
This may sound silly but remember I was a child. I believed that books were just there. Just on the book shelves and such. I didn't really think about who wrote it or who took time to make this beautiful world. I just thought, "Hey, a story."
So, Daemon and the other daemon, never thought that there was a writer behind those tales? I remember after "Alice in Wonderland" or "Huckleberry Fin", who wrote that? I recall (a very long time ago) that after reading Where the Wild Things Are. I was suspicious when Mom put us into the car and asked, "Are you taking us to Maurice's house?" She looked at me like I was 'stupid'. _
It does. Another of those Victorian-era terms for diseases we now know by different names. My own great great grandfather died in London of 'apoplexy.' I once thought that meant he'd had a major temper tantrum! However, it turns out, we'd call that a 'stroke' these days.
Not that I never thought there was a writer, just that I never cared to learn much about the writer. (To tell you the truth, I still kind of prefer to know as little as possible about the author of whatever book I read.)
