I dream characters but not plots. My dreams tend to be vivid and realistic, so I usually wake up wondering where the heck I'd met that person or how I knew them. After the first cup of coffee, I realize they were fictitious. Occasionally I'll dream a scene, as was the case with my current WIP and its two MCs.
Dreams? Near dreams, maybe. Those moments when I'm on the edge of sleep and an image or a solution to a plot problem pops up. Current WIP came from something like that, and last night I realized that my MC had a phobia of parakeets due to his previous trip to Hell. I didn't want to get up and write it down because I was warm and under the covers, so I focused hard on the idea so that it would stay with me. It did, yay me.
dreams don't make good prose needs to be grounded in a proper narrative & a dream never really is i mean i like alice but it's an oddity i wouldn't want all prose to be like alice
That depends on the dream. If my characters are related, I may take some notes of the scene and maybe use it. Or I may only like the plot but not use the characters, and the contrary happens as well of course.
Absolutely. I've had dreams that sparked an entire book, I've also been thinking about a story idea when I went to sleep and dreamed up entire scenes. Sometimes, these are kind of crazy ideas, the subconscious isn't very good at staying rational, but hey, you take inspiration where you can get it.
My book was inspired by a dream, though they have nothing to do with each other. The dream was of a dance competition in the Roman Collesium and I was doing parkour on a monster truck, and the story has nothing to do with dancing, monster trucks, nor Rome. But I developed a great story out of it somehow
I hated writing. Hated it for decades, until a four year recurring nightmare drove me to write a paragraph or two and literally burn it. I haven't stopped for three years. I'm a third of the way at 180kw, and then this other story emerged... (Help meeee!) Whoa! That's heavy! I love those, write em down!
Nope, mostly because I don't remember them and when I do they're weird (the useless kind), right now I only remember two: in one I was having an epic battle against Mewtwo and in the other one I was fist fighting two velociraptors.
I once had a dream where I thought of an awesome alien invasion plot. I woke up desperate to find a notepad because the story was so cool I would never have thought of it in my waking hours. After failing to find a pen - and it having been about 3am on a work night - I decided I would definitely remember something that awesome and went back to bed. I woke up the next day and had forgotten everything but the basic premise. To this day, I don't know if the search for a notepad with the memory of a cool story was part of the dream, or if it actually happened.
Yesterday I had a small mail conversation with someone that is writing a story. at 04.17 this morning(night i would say) my old phone (retired, now only acts as music player) suddenly announced "Ony 15% battery left, please charge me." It is only when something like that happens that I remember dreams. But I was dreaming something out of the story my friend is writing. In my dreams I am so stupid I don't want to write about them.
I used to have a recurring dream, facets of which have pretty hugely influenced my writing when I was younger. Used to keep a dream journal too, which helped me remember them. A lot of what I started with back then has morphed over the years, and branched off from the original 'image' as I've kept writing. No direct plots or anything since, as people have said, dreams are chaos and it's rare that any coherent plotline or characters come out of mine. Just the general feel and an image or two that I can remember.
I very rarely dream or remember them so not one character is from a dream - nothing. I'm inspired by everyday life and incredible stories and journey's other people go on. I also never base any of my characters on anyone I know.
I very rarely ever remember my dreams, but one kept recurring which is probably why I remember it, and I did decide to turn it into the book I'm currently working on. It remains to be seen if it's really worth writing about, but I'm hoping that once it's all written down I'll stop dreaming about it.
All of the time. I personally think dreams are the greatest source of inspiration for writing - they're inherently abstract and different and loaded with symbolism. David Lynch talks about the power of dreams in the creative process, and he is of the persuasion that stories and concepts are fed to us from the 'dream space' - we only channel them and put them into our work. While I don't entirely subscribe to that, it's still a really cool way of thinking about our dreams and our unconscious bursts of inspiration and serves the generation of new ideas. A good writing exercise is to take any dream, no matter how silly, and try and build a logic around it. For example, just last night I dreamt that I had come across some old book which claimed there was a giant hippo floating above the Earth (swear to god) and so I managed to get this half space-ship/half blimp thing and a crew together and we floated up and up until, low and behold, we found this planet-sized hippo scratching the orbit of Earth. Everyone including me freaked out at the sheer impossibility of such a thing, and the dream went from being silly to something a little Lovecraftian and surreal. I'm considering turning it into a short-story.
It's very weird but I constantly dream with random people telling me to write certain things and how they want it to be writen by me. It's funny though.
Almost always, although sometimes my dreams are inspired by my 'writing'. I usually have a hard time falling asleep, so I make up short scenes in my mind, like reading myself a book. It helps me fall asleep, but then often I dream about what I thought up the night before and things go from there.
Yes, totally. I have started a new short story on a dream I had where I had to drink motel metal. I don't know, maybe too much cheese that night.... Any way, I've got a couple of thousand words down so far...
Had a science fantasy story the other night: The world is a desert. A boy and his father - who are members of symbiotic race - need to take a pilgrimage across the world to the very last pool where their tiny symbiotic insect still lives. The boy must be baptised in the waters, to take on the symbiote. Then there was something about an old tree, in which the tiny creatures spend the first part of their life cycle, in nuts (like nutmegs). The tree is ancient, blackened and twisted, and also one of the last of its kind. Kind of sad, the ending of a world and a race.
I had an incredibly vivid dream where I was pitching my idea to Michael Keaton because I wanted him to voice the one of the main characters in the movie adaptation (because I really believed it would be that successful). I bought a notebook and started handwriting it straight away before I lost it, and made some minor changes. It was the first idea I had managed to properly plan out and get half way through and I'm loving where it's going and the fact it all stemmed from a dream. Moving house I thought I had lost it and moved on to a new, less dream based idea which I am still working on now. My space adventure will just have to continue once I finish my current passion project.
Not my dreams but before I go to bed, when I am trying to fall asleep I come up with my best ideas. Handy to have the ipad at the ready, brightness turned way down. I like the bear app for nighttime notes.
