I had an idea for the novel I'm currently writing by dreaming. It wasn't even a night dream, more like a sunday morning half dream state, you know , when you're not awake but not sleeping either. I really had vivid images of scenes, with places, and dialogues,and the people in my dreams were either complete stranger, an actress from a tv show I've been watching a lot these few months, and also one friend from university. When I woke up, I grabbed a pen and paper and started writing down everything I remembered for like 30 minutes, I wrote 4 pages descripting what I had seen, what the people looked like/their personality etc... And since I had dreamed about something that was clearly the final scenes of the story, I basically have my ending and most of the plot without even trying to write anything. In fact I had not written anything for 4 months before I had this dream. I think it's really amazing ! And do any of you have any idea how come I had such a dream ? I mean is there any psychology behind these stuff ? Because apart from the tv show actress and my friend , the rest of the dream was completely foreign to me, and I've never read a book or seen a movie about the kind of story I dreamed about !
Funnily enough, last night I had the craziest dream, and I woke up in the middle of the night and immediately started trying to write down what I can remember of it too. I've spent the best part of today trying to puzzle it together and make sense out of it.
Hi, I never remember my dreams, but you are in good company. Kekule a famous organic chemist, worked out the cyclic nature of the benzene molecule in a dream. Cheers, Greg.
Literally every single story I've worked on came from a dream (minus one short story that I came up with on the fly and my most recent WIP). That's not to say they stay that way. Most of them grow away from my dream, but I can still remember the elements that brought me to them.
Okay, I might be the only one this happens to, but I sometimes dream in narration. Like I am the narrator and I am telling the story that I am dreaming about. I am not one of the people in it. Is that crazy?
For me it hasn't quite been dreaming but that moment when you're trying to sleep and find yourself thinking about random stuff, sometimes something awkward you did like ten years ago. I've had some great ideas during that near sleep moment.
Not whole novels but certainly lines of poetry have stayed with me after I woke. Eat cheese just before you go to bed - if it doesn't give you indigestion and keep you awake, it's said to make dreams more vivid.
Most of the ideas came from my dream, but I still had to modifiy some stuff, for example, the MC's Dad is now a demonic creature from celtic mythology who feeds from people's vital energy, but when i dreamt about it, it was a kind of vampire who feed off people vital energy, but vampires ? so unoriginal. And to keep people captive before he ate them, he froze them in my dream, really weird lol, and now I decided he lock them up in their own minds.
My ideas frequently come from dreams, though, in their finished state, they rarely ever resemble what I initially intended.
I have crazy dreams, usually rooted well in the past. I sent this one to my friend, because she loves analyzing them: Note, this is a real dream, and the paste here hasn't been edited or grammar checked....Some of it makes no sense. The setting was a Lake Resort of some type that was a cross between a resort and a national park. The Lake resort property was a combination of buildings, places, streets, I had seen in my past, but I’ve never been to this Lake resort. I had the sense it was summer time. The dream started with me and Charlie on the outskirts of the Lake resort area on a gravel road. The sun hadn’t set, but there was an eerie overcast. We were travelling the road because (someone) had told me an old girlfriend, who I hadn’t seen since the 80s, worked at the Resort and lived in the housing area on the outskirts. I had a sense that all the support workers of the Lake resort lived in this housing area… We came upon the area of housing and the one Sabrina (and our relationship wasn't even that hot or heavy) was supposedly in a house that was at the top of a small hill. The sky turned even darker until you would think it was the depth of night. The house was old. Whitewash paint had peeled away to reveal black wood underneath. Many of the wooden planks had curled and pulled away from the frame. All around, other houses were in similar disrepair. The house had been cut up into several crude apartments and I walked around the house until I found where I thought Sabrina would be. Charlie stayed well behind as I knocked on the door, but I had the feeling that something was wrong, that I was interrupting, intruding. So as soon as I knocked, I regretted it. No one answered. Charlie and I turned to walk away and the door flung open. All I could see was the dark silhouette of a featureless old person. She yelled, “What!” Then she slammed the door shut. Thinking I had the wrong place. I suggested to Charlie that we check the mailboxes. The mailboxes were very odd – black bags attached to old tires. All of them tossed onto mound, as if they were debris, with no sense of order. We rummaged through the mailboxes (bags) but didn’t see any names. Lights started to turn on in nearby houses and Charlie and I made a run for it. We ran back toward the Lake resort and came upon a one-room concrete block building with a pool table. No door, the building was just three sides, a roof, and lights strung inside. Several guys were playing pool and one looked like an old friend from the 90s. But when I got close it wasn’t him. The guys in the outdoor pool hall were a bit rough around the social corners. Beards, tattoos, and I sensed they didn’t like strangers. I didn’t say anything to any of them. Charlie and I continued to walk back toward the heart of Lake Resort. We came upon a party of some sort. Hordes of young people on a wooden boardwalk that hung over the lake. They were dancing, drinking, and watching jet boats on the lake. Live music blared but I have no idea what or who was playing. As soon as I stepped up onto the boardwalk, my daughter, Brittany appeared. She was wearing her favorite bathing suit from the late 90s and she was only 8 or 9 years old, but she acted much older. The sun was shining now. A crystal blue sky. Charlie was, suddenly, gone. Brittany and I walked the boardwalk. Young people were still partying; their backs to the wall of a resort building that reminded me of an outdoor bar. The wood, the buildings, the patio furniture, everything was new or had been recently built. Brittany stopped and pointed at one young man in dread locks. “You’re the drug dealer.” She said. She said it as if she were pointing him out to me. As if she wanted me to ‘clean’ this place up. I ushered her from the boardwalk and soon we were back on a gravel path that bordered the lake. We made our way to another part of the lake and this time, instead of a boardwalk, it was a large dock and we went for a swim. There were other people on the dock and I sensed that I knew them. As I was climbing out of the lake back onto the deck, an old friend from the Air Force was sitting with his legs hanging over the edge. “Must be nice,” he said. The way he said it, his tone, was sarcastic. Then it occurred to me that he worked at the Lake resort. I climbed out and had a sense that I was much younger. That I was the father I was when Brittany was 9. I was in shape, tanned, with a head full of sun-colored hair. Then, I sensed that I owned the resort, that I had just recently purchased it. That everything I had seen all along in the dream was mine. Brittany said she was going to platform ride behind a large jet boat that was moored at the dock. “Okay,” I said, but I was nervous. I watched the boat go out. It went out in a perfect straight line and angle from the dock. The path struck me as unusual and I watched intently. Then, as soon as it was out, it reversed and came straight back to the dock. When the boat returned, it gunned its jet engines to stop from slamming into the dock and Brittany fell into the water. She was trapped under the surge and power of the jet’s propulsion. I couldn’t see her, so I dived in. I found her underneath the water and it struck me that the water was clear, too clear to be Lake water. Her cheeks were puffed out like she did as a child when we would duck under the water in the pools while we were on vacation. She was holding her breathe. I pushed her toward the surface. There were other people riding the platform, and they had fallen in, too. But when I looked for them, they were gone. “I’m okay,” Brittany said. “The sudden stop scared me, but I’m okay.” Then I woke up. -- so, this is how I dream. Vivid dreams that I tend to write down as soon as I wake up. My friend, the one who analyzes dreams, said I "was worried about a change in the state of my financial or social standing." And, if you think this dream is bizarre, wait until I find the 'craziest' dream I've ever had and post it -- I think it's on a usb drive somewhere. Also, I tend to have awesome dreams if the TV is on when I fall asleep. Or once, when I was listening to an audio read of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and fell asleep.
Yep, I have definitely experienced this. Usually they happen either just as I'm falling asleep, or right before I wake up. The best and most vivid ones happen in the morning, before I wake up. Usually, I get up and write down as quickly as I can before the feeling of it all fades. This happened just last week, actually. Quite frankly, I sometimes look back on these scribblings and they don't hold up to the light of day, they are too out there. But many of them have potential. I think of these as little "story germs." They aren't full grown and realized, but they are the seed.
Arghhh!!!! I can't find the other dream and it was amazing -- had leopards, a church, a road with a cliff, and an old couple in it. It was truly bizarre.
Okay, since you asked. It's a bit long! (By the way, it may be important to note that I experience lucid dreaming quite frequently, by that I mean that I am semi-aware that I am dreaming and can control certain aspects of my dream. Sometimes it is as strong as "I don't like this dream. SWITCH, channel changed, new dream begins," and sometimes it is as simple as, "Hmm...I think this is a dream, I wonder what would happen if I did this?" or "I think this is going to happen. Oh, yep, it did." This dream had a bit of the latter going on so I was able to explore what was happening with a certain amount of awareness. So anyway. This was what I wrote after I woke up: Spoiler: The Dream A group of convicted felons and I are driven to the seashore and made to get out. We are shepherded into the sea. We have no idea what is happening. The water is choppy but not cold. We can see boats and jetskies doing their thing. What the heck do they want us to do out here? Drown? Then a strange man appears. His hair is white, and he has a long scraggly beard. His skin is dark tan, similar to a pacific islander’s skin. He comes walking up to us in the water. He is not wearing a shirt, and you can tell that he is very physically fit for his advanced age. He bids us to follow him. We are confused. He looks at the baby in my arms (she isn't mine, but I am protective of her) with great import. I hold her tightly to my chest. He walks deeper into the water, trying to avoid being squished by boats or jetskies. We seem to walk forever. And then suddenly the sand gives way and we step off into open water. Somehow, we get to this isolated sea cave, impossible to get to by land. I think we swim? (I don’t know how I swim with a baby in my arms. Apparently it doesn’t matter?) At this point, all of the felons are young adults like me. Luna from HP is there, oddly. I am one of the last to emerge in the sea cave. A kid is freaking out, because a strange male also bare-chested has touched him and apparently poked a hole in his finger. The kid, who is heavy set and kindly, is upset because he is an arcitecht or something and he needs his hands. The old man has disappeared and a young woman is now guiding us. She implores us to let the strange, bare-chested male touch us. I go up to him and reach out my hand. He touches me. It stings a little, like his hand is covered in thousands of tiny needles. I feel them prick tiny holes into my skin, but it does not draw blood. He then proceeds to grab my face with both hands, pricking my face, then my neck, my shoulders, my arms, my rib cage, my legs. I am thoroughly pricked. He pricks the baby too, but she doesn’t seem to notice. The others ware watching me and see this. They allow themselves to be pricked as well. Then, they take us back into the cave. The cave, by the way, is filled with old wood and seaweed and looks very pirate-y. The guy shows us what to do next. He climbs up this wall and we think he is going up into some kind of fort above our heads, but that wouldn't make sense, because I'm pretty sure they are water-people. Mermaids? Anyway, he doesn’t. He hooks his legs through this shelf thing, and lets his torso fall back down, so he is hanging upside down. Then, he pushes off and goes plunging into deep, dark water below. He does not resurface. The girl who is leading us urges us to do the same. Luna and I go first. We climb up side by side. When I get upside down, I have them hand the baby to me. I'm not worried she's going to drown, I know that we're going to be fine. And then we plunge into the water. We can breathe. All the holes they pricked us with, I know. Down below is a whole underwater world. I notice that my fingers have now a thing, almost clear membrane between them. My toes too. The dream begins to fade. I’m not ready for it go go. I want to know more. A woman comes up to me and invites me to slip into a strange skin-like material that fits over my legs and gives me one large fin, like a mermaid. She says it’s for travel in open water. Here in the shelter, they never use them. The baby is important somehow. She’s supposed to fulfill some sort of prophecy. Ugh, cliche prophecy. The dream ends.
