Inspiration from Dreams

Last night, I woke up from a creepy "stuck in a haunted house" kind of dream that I'm still thinking about the next afternoon. There was slow flooding and a kraken involved, and when I woke up, I had just scheduled an appointment with Lucifer to make a deal to get out. The whole vibe was very dark and ominous, and now I'm pondering how I might turn it into a story.

Does anyone else here ever get inspiration for new stories from their dreams? I've written two short stories that started out as dreams, and I think they're some of my most interesting work. I also have a few projects that never made it past the "notes in a file" stage, but which I might revisit someday.

Since dreams are often disjointed and hard to make a linear plot from, I've found it's more about capturing the mood and using some specific images. Nearly all of my dream stories/ideas are in the horror genre; are nightmares easier to remember when you wake up because of their intensity, or are you just more likely to wake up in the middle of them? Maybe a little of both.

Any thoughts? I'd love to hear about your experiences, folks!

 

I'm open to this, but I've only ever gotten bits and pieces from it.
As a child I had a nightmare about the sky having eyes, so I often write the sky like it's a malign onlooker that characters want to hide from.
But that's only an irrational tic, among many.

I believe nightmares are the unconscious mind trying to warn the conscious mind. They are often about hidden or social dangers - illustrated using a library of fearsome memories. So I suppose it's common for nightmares to be the clearest dreams.
And I suppose consciously mining the horror genre is more reliable than unconsciously dreaming. But I'll take any inspiration going.

About the nightmares that wake us up: do you find those are often the same nightmare and it's when you've heard something move, or forgotten to lock a door, or to take medicine?
Those ones might be less interesting if the unconscious brain just reaches for go-to reveille images.

 

I have dreamed entire scenes and got up in a panic to write it all down before I forget. I also prefer to write in the early morning when I'm still in the state between fully awake and asleep....I find my creativity in there is much more productive.

 

I did write a story based on a dream once, long ago. It was one of the few stories I finished back in those days. It launched me on writing in a different way than I had been, and very quickly afterwards my writing improved drastically. Because of the way dreams are, and the nature of the story, it brought in a meandering looseness of approach, but at the same time a more powerful drama, because the story was dreamlike. Apparently that was exactly what my writing needed.

My friend and I were writig stories about a couple of stoners based very loosely on a combination of Bill & Ted, Cheech & Chong, and Jay & Silent Bob. All very loose postmodernist comedies, and now I understand they're all built on the nonsensical flow of words and ideas that move in a dereamlike way to shape the narrative. Surreal, like Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz, where things people say seem to create the world and things in it. I wasn't consciously aware of that aspect of it at the time, but I seem to have latched onto it subconsciously and ran with it. Not so much in that first story (maybe a little), but in the next few. I guess I stopped trying to exert too much logical conscious control over what happens and let it happen spontaneously, but with a dreamlike feel or logic that was just what those stories needed.

In the dream I discovered there was a strain of secret drugs that would give a totally new kind of high (each one different from the others). The names were something like Barbal 1, Barbal 3, Barbal 7, Barbal 13 etc. They reminded me of prime numbers, but I don't remember if they were, or just my subconscious' idea of them. I kept finding them on the street or in abandened buildings etc and taking them, and each time I'd experience a really intense drug trip and weird things would happen. After a while I'd come down and find the next one. They were all in different forms—one was a tiny vial with liquid in it, one was a plain white pill with an arrow engraved in it that was always pointing up no matter how you turn the pill etc. It felt dangerous and exciting and revelatory all at the same time. Oh, and I'd find the drugs next to guys who were passed out and tripping really hard, or in some cases maybe dead?

In the stories prior to that dream, we just had them be 'Dudes who get high' driving around in a white Dodge Charger and having comedic run-ins with police. In one we had random TV game show hosts show up as some kind of undercover agents and all get in fights with each other. But the stories were just dumb. So I brought in these Barbal drugs and had the guys discover them and find one of them and take it just to see what happens. At that point I had the story become like a hallucinatory dream where they went on a wild adventure that bends the parameters of reality, and then make their way back to where they had started. The high got really intense at its peak, and as it was fading they found their way back, and then they 'woke' from the trip and wondered was it real, or did they just imagine it in a drug-induced stupor? It wasn't clear which.

Wrote a few more stories like that, with a completely different kind of drug trip experience each time and very different kind of adventure, and it's like this opened up my mind to how to write better. Trying to figure out why it improved my work, I would say I began to integrate their getting high with the experience of the trip and the adventure, whereas before we would just write "They smoked a few bowls and went driving around... ' Hey, maybe it's when I started to grasp how to show rather than tell? Without having any idea there was such a thing or that it had a name. I started taking the reader into the experience along with them and making them feel it. Because that's what the dream was like—totally different from the shallow way we had been writing. I wanted to make the stories feel the way that dream did to me.

 

I wish. My dreams (the ones I remember) are bland and mundane, usually about places I used to work.

 

Oh man, when I have dreams about places I used to work they're far from bland or mundane. More like desperate and intense. Usually I suddenly remembered I was supposed to be at work—had forgotten to go in for a few years, and when I went there it's a whole new crew I don't know and new equipment I wasn't trained on, and I have to close, and there's a massive rush coming in (restaurant jobs). Fun stuff.

 

I get those too. I just realized though, it's been pretty long now since I've had either.

 

My dreams are very detailed and realistic, to the point where if I dream about an animated scene, I see it as it would look if it were live, something like the live Disney remakes. Same with people. My poem “Ballad of the Video-Game Hero,” about a video-game hero betrayed by his people, was a perfect example of this—it was a dream I had ten years ago. Sometimes other people’s dreams are good for this as well, as in my recent poem “All That’s Left Is Yours.”

Also, sometimes I dream about coming up with an idea to write, and then I wake up and write it. I wrote an entire short story based on one of those.

 

I don't think so - it's more likely that I wake up when there's a strong emotional moment in the dream - which probably also helps me remember them, since intense emotion is important for memory in general. The interesting follow-up question to that is whether more positive emotions aren't strong enough to wake me up or I just don't experience intense positive emotions while I'm dreaming. Hmm....

Ah, yes, that liminal state between sleep and waking. Lots of good stuff there. Though I'm a night person, and I'm more likely to get my inspiration while I'm trying to fall asleep, which leads to a dangerous cycle in which I lie down, get an idea, turn the light on and write it down in the notebook by my bed, turn the light back off, get another idea, write it down, get even more ideas, etc. until I finally get out of bed and spew as many ideas onto a page as I can and hope it's enough to let me sleep.

I don't generally have work dreams, but I have dreamed about getting ready for work - showering, shaving, getting dressed, all that, then waking up and realizing that I have to do it all over again. I hate those dreams.

 

If I wrote down everything that I had from my dreams as story inspiration, I'm pretty sure that the men in the white coats would have came for me ages ago.

 

Plus of course waking in the middle of a dream helps with remembering it. And waking with the dream on your mind, as it definitely would be.

Here's my take on it (and I've done a lot of study into dreams and sleep-related phenomenae)—Distress acts like an alarm when you're sleeping, whether it comes from a dream or you sense unexpected movement nearby, or smell smoke or something. You don't really know the difference, dreams register just like waking reality while you're dreaming them. But I think there's another factor as well. Some dreams are your unconscious trying to tell you something important that you're missing in your life (in conscious awareness). If your life is going off kilter, a nightmare or frightening dream may well be telling you you need to do something that your'e not doing (or vice versa). It makes sense, if a dream is a warning or important message, that it should make a very powerful emotional impression (so you'll think about it long and hard), and that it should wake you up so you don't have more dreams and forget about it.

Positive emotions aren't associated with distress or dire warnings. If you're having happy dreams things are probably going pretty well in general for you, so it lets you sleep on (the unconscious that is). The vast majority of dreams though lean toward the negative, at least nominally. Very few are happy happy dreams.

 

Right now I'm writing a scene based partially on an actual event from my life (imagine that! ), and I just decided to add in part of a dream I had... maybe ten or fifteen years ago? Probably more. I really don't know when. Probably more like 20 or 30. It's weird how certain dreams stand out and still feel semi-fresh decades later.

In the dream I was out in an area of bare dirt that was sort of a big bluff. The bluff and the ground under it were totally bare earth and I was running around in it playing with a big wolf that apparently would occasionally come out of the woods and be my friend or semi-pet (in the dream). The ground was sculpted into big rectangular forms something like the shape of buildings, a little taller than me. After a while I was completley covered with dirt, big thick lumps of it all over my clothes. At that point if I remember right the bluff wall became a restaurant and I had to go inside to talk to somebody (becoming something like a work dream?). There were lots of people, and I was extremely aware of my horribly dirty clothes. So was everybody else.

Fun dream!

 

It really is amazing the way some dreams stick with us; I can remember a few that go back to adolescence, though nothing earlier than that. Still, that's 30+ years for the earliest ones. I'm curious how you plan to use your dream in the scene you're adding. I've written full stories based on the seed of a single dream, but I've never combined a dream with another idea. I definitely want to know how that works out for you.