IMO, not a good idea. Italics are a pain to read; unless the dream is just a sentence or two, I wouldn't do it.
I see. I'm fine with reading italics, but the nightmare is quite short anyway. Thank you for your input.
I totally agree with Ginger. I would hope that people would focus more on the ways things can be made to work, rather than nursing a fixed notion that certain things will never work. Stories can certainly open with a dream. Just figure out how to make that work. Study the pitfalls of any kind of opener. Most of them contain negative effects as well as positives. Open in 'media res' and the momentum will drop afterwards. Open with a battle and the reader may not know what's at stake. Open with dialogue, and you risk people not caring about the speakers yet, because we're only just meeting them. Open with a prologue, and if it's just an infodump, folks may skip it. Open with a slow introduction to the story setting and characters, and readers might get impatient for something to 'happen.' Open with a dream and it may confuse the reader into thinking it's really happening. Every writing choice you make has positives and negatives. All you need to do is study what each of them CAN do for your story, and what each of them MAY do to your story if you don't handle it well.
There's always the start of Fredric Brown's The Night of the Jabberwock, which starts with... "In my dream I was standing in the middle of Oak Street and it was dark night. The street lights were off; only pale moonlight glinted on the huge sword that I swung in circles about my head as the Jabberwock crept closer. It bellied along the pavement, flexing its wings and tensing its muscles for the final rush; its claws clicked against the stones like the clicking of mats down the channels of a Linotype. Then, astonishingly, it spoke. "Doc," it said. "Wake up, Doc." A hand - not the hand of a Jabberwock - was shaking my shoulder. And it was early dusk instead of black night and I was sitting in the swivel chair at my battered desk, looking over my shoulder at Pete." I think the trick is keep it short, entertaining in its own right, and - for me - don't try to hide the fact that it's a dream.
The issue with opening with a dream is that it can be cheap, it's usually kind of a cheaty way to try and capture the reader's attention. I almost want to call it the jump scare of writing. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's just very hard to execute and far too many people ruin the name of the practice by misusing it, a lot. Dream sequences usually have no bearing on the story at all, usually just to make any ol' thing happen, since they can, because it's a dream. The skies can rain blood and the main character can die, and then the main character wakes up, and then the reader goes "okay, so that was a colossal waste of time, I basically read nothing." The issue about it is, it's usually a crutch for people who don't want to take the time or effort to open the story with a legitimately gripping event, because admitting, it's hard. The reader doesn't care about your story yet, you can't make things happen that the reader will care about, you have to use the opening to make the reader care in the first place. And usually, if a book opens up with a dream sequence, especially one that isn't made clear it's a dream until after the character wakes up, then the reader basically feels like you just yelled in their face to get their attention. At that point, they usually don't even want to care about the story anymore. I can see your dream opening is different from the norm. It doesn't feel like it's trying to grab my attention so much as it is explaining to me the character's personality and faults. It's always good to introduce a character showing their faults and quirks first and foremost, because then it's easier to care about them, you want to see exactly what's wrong with them and what they do to earn such descriptions of a broken person. Personally, I wouldn't do that with a dream, or flashback/whatever, it's usually better to do that kind of thing when they're interacting with someone else, or interacting with the real world in some way, so you can also take the opportunity to describe the character's world. Ultimately, dream openings are just a bad idea because they inherently leave out information that otherwise could have been used to build up the world of your book. After that, you have to awkwardly find other areas to show the reader your characters and world, what's at stake, and trying to get around the rather distasteful opening you just wrote. If you're going with the dream thing, I'd really like to see how well you make it work by trying to set up the character's personality rather than reaching for a cheap grip on the reader, it would be very interesting to see that work out, and it would definitely be worth some praise if you made it work well. And, if you find it doesn't work out, don't be discouraged. Openings are hard, but if you just dwell on it enough, eventually you'll get a fantastic flash of inspiration.
I have 100+ novels on my Kindle, waiting to be read. If I open one and it starts with a dream, it's getting deleted right away so I can move on to the next.
I would go one better... write the entire story, then, in the last line have your protagonist wake bolt upright in bed, let out a heavy sigh, wipe his brow and exclaim, "It was all just a dream." Here's what the folks at Writer's Digest say about opening stories with a dream... Never, ever, ever begin a narrative with action and then reveal the character’s merely dreaming it all. Not unless you’d like your manuscript hurled across the room, accompanied by a series of curses. Followed by the insertion of a form rejection letter into your SASE and delivered by the minions of our illustrious postal service. Even though we’re dealing with beginnings here, it bears mentioning that you should never–and I mean never never—end a story by revealing that all that has gone on before was just a dream. Not unless you enjoy the prospect of strangers hunting you down and doing you bodily harm should such a story somehow find print. That said, who am I to tell someone not to break the rules.
There are plenty of ways to open with a dream in an interesting way. It's also okay to use italics, despite what many might say. I take it that the discrimination against opening with dreams has to do with an abuse of trust. That is, what the reader thought was meaningful suddenly isn't. So make it meaningful. You know by now it's a cliche, so learn the common pitfalls and do it better. And don't bend over backwards for those who would set aside your book for opening with a dream or containing italics. When you ask writers for advice, you're going to get a lot of self-important feedback about how things "should" be done. But the moment you give more importance to following rules than writing the story you want to write, in the way you want to write it, you've already lost your way.
@GingerCoffee -- I've never heard not to use flashbacks. Wondering why and where you picked that up. I use flashbacks all the time and see them in stories all the time. What's the problem with flashbacks? I honestly want to know what you've heard. Also, I think a few short story sales in quite impressive. Don't downplay that and anyone who does just doesn't know what they are talking about.
Nah, I'm not that cruel. Unless the book involves some sort of mental illness, where dreams are confused with reality. Even then, I'd probably do more research than the actual writing. I remember my high school English teacher being hell bent against ending stories with "It's all just a dream". And I was too, and I still am. That's why I wrote a short and vague nightmare. My reader won't complete the chapter feeling betrayed...hopefully.
Excellent comment. I never really thought about why a dream opening is despised, except that its cliche and whatnot. But you explained it clearly. I'm trying to scratch my brain and remember a good book that began with a dream...and I can't. So I know its rare. Perhaps that's why I'm willing to challenge myself and see if I can do it. Of course, I'm not only writing a dream opening to challenge myself. I think its important enough to the overall plot and the first chapter, which I had considered naming "Nightmares of Blood" or something like that. After this nightmare, the character goes to her job as a Medic, where she learns that a wounded stranger from outside the village had been crying her name.
One of the best sci-fi movies from the 50s, Invaders From Mars, ends with little David waking up to find out it was all a dream. It was cheating in a way. The seemingly impossible situation with the Martian having just about everyone under its control with little devices drilled into the back of their necks was resolved with the classic example of a deus ex machina. But then the twist happens, that night David looks out his window and sees the space ship landing in the field and sinking into the sand the same way the movie had opened. And of course there is Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. Sometimes these things work. I agree with what's been said, take the time to learn why opening with a dream is frowned on, but if in the end that dream sequence belongs then it should be fine. Of course it needs to be especially compelling because you might run into someone who writes the story off without giving it a chance because of a bias. And it's in those first opening paragraphs that one, especially a new writer, needs to hook the reader.
I think @raine_d is spot-on. My feeling are the same about dream openings. They seem to work better if the reader is informed, right at the start, that the sequence is a dream—unless like in @GingerCoffee 's example about the Martians, that the reader is, indeed, meant to think the dream is real. Or one of the most famous 'dream' openings—to Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca: 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a ..."
Alice works for the same reason Jacob's Ladder works, they're not trying to tell the classic story framework of downfall-comeback-triumph, they're telling a fantastic story that defiantly rebels against reality, they're more like a magic show than a story. For that reason, I think it speaks volumes for how difficult it is to work with dreams when you have to work with an entirely different framework of a story.
Yes indeed... I had completely forgotten that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is all in Alice's head, as she sleeps in the shade of a tree, dead leaves falling like playing cards upon her face. Lewis Carroll uses the dream device to absolute perfection. Methinks, I would not want to put my talents up against his.
It could help if the dream image you use is one that IS very clearly dreamlike, and one/or that readers identify with. But this can be surprising... I once wrote a little set of ficlets about different characters' nightmares, and the one that got the biggest reaction - which surprised me at the time - was the one where the POV character felt his teeth falling out and was trying to keep them in his mouth (I'd read about that dream somewhere and thought it very him). A fair number of people came back "I've had that dream!!!" Also, if you've seen it, the MASH episode based on dreams is brilliant.
My "dream" first chapter actually plays a key role in my story. As my MC starts to discover and hone her abilities, she'll realize it wasn't just a chance dream. It's actually a cryptic message given to her from the collective essence of her previous lives guiding her to discover her ultimate destiny.
Personal opinion here obviously. But opening with a dream is my nightmare! I hate it and not just because I've seen it done so many times but because it tricks the reader. Something really active is happening and then you find out...no it wasn't. Your character was just sleeping and now we have to go through the mundane info of them waking up and getting out of bed. (me - close the book). I feel like it's a writers cheat way of drawing us into a boring chapter and because they put not time into thinking of a better way. Especially when the dream has no relevance to the story what so ever. Or they use the excuse of: "the character can see the future but only through dreams." or it was a warning/message for her to figure out to save her life. That doesn't work for me either. Times when it was ok for me: When the book really focused on the dream world as a theme and a setting. But then it was more like a remote viewing that an actual dream you had no control over and it turned out to be a training session rather than the character sweetly dreaming. The other one time was in a horror that looked at the dream world in a nightmarish way and the character slowly got sucked deeper into the world every time he feel asleep until he got trapped there. But even then, there's no reason to open with a dream sequence. I think if the dream world is a part of your novel you need to let the readers know this so that when a dream is first shown, we know there is a point to it.
