Hi guys! I'm relatively new here and I had an idea for an interesting thread, so forgive me if it's been done before.
I have lots of dreams. Crazy, vivid dreams. Some of them are just stupid, some are awesome, but a lot of them make me want to tell them to people. So I thought I'd open this discussion for you to share your dream stories - almost like a short, short story. Tell me what happened in a dream you remember. Everyone's will be different. Whether it's scary, funny, or just plain weird, I wanna read it.
When I was taking a creative writing course a couple years ago, I had trouble coming up with a short story. One night, I had a nightmarish dream - wasn't quite a nightmare, but it was very dramatic. I wasn't even myself - it was like I was playing the part of a character, so I instantly wrote it when I woke up. I'll start by sharing this dream with you. This is almost exactly as it happened, but I've written it in the format of an overly-descriptive story because I had to, but you can write it as basic as you'd like...
The blue sky was being suffocated by ash-coloured clouds. I was lost, but every emotion had drained from my body. I wasn’t even scared anymore. I was too focused. There was no way I would give up now. I was standing in the middle of some sort of tarmacked car park. I glanced to my left and noticed a throng of couples gathering around a large temporary board. As I approached, I could see the polaroid faces of children. Sad children. Sleeping children. Babies. Toddlers. Adolescents. And a handwritten list of names. I watched as one balding gentleman scrolled down the list with his index finger, like a child finding out if they were cast in the school play. When he reached the last name, he stood up straight and returned to his wife who was waiting nervously behind the rest of the crowd. All he did was look at her and she began quietly sobbing against his puffed out chest. I glanced back at the board and my eye was instantly drawn to a snap of a young boy in a green and white hoody. It was Joe. And he was smiling. I pushed to the front to get a closer look. He was smiling. Joe had a contagious grin and even now I managed to catch it. There was some writing beneath his polaroid:
SITUATED AT HOSPITAL, WALTINGHAM WAY.
I squeezed my way out of the swarm just as a filthy black taxi was passing me at an oddly slow speed. I flung a hand on the driver’s open window and told the guy - the scruffy, solemn-looking guy - that I needed to go to Waltingham Way.
‘Sorry,’ said the gruff Mediterranean voice. ‘I’m not doing business.’
He didn’t even bother looking at me. I pleaded with him. My son needed me. He was in a hospital by himself. The driver turned his head to the left, where his equally scruffy Alsatian was perched on the passenger seat. He turned his head back to me and nodded. I jumped into the back of the cab. This is when I noticed the crimson liquid all over the Plexiglas divide. I felt my heart flutter for a moment – it was obviously as shocked as I was. The dog turned its head to look at me. His eyes were lifeless. Before I could even open my mouth, the driver spoke.
‘I know,’ he said staring straight ahead. ‘I know.’ With that, he reached across and opened the passenger door. The dog jumped out onto the tarmac and gazed back up at his owner. Without uttering a single word, the driver lifted a shotgun from his lap and aimed it at the dog. One deafening blast. His head was gone. I noticed that people were now staring at us in a stunned silence. This was one taxi ride I wouldn’t forget in a hurry. This fucking virus was spreading unbelievably fast and I needed to get to Joe before it got to me. Still staring straight ahead, the driver spoke one last time.
‘I will get you to your son.’ He interrupted my thanks. ‘But you must promise me that when we get there, you will kill me too.’
I covered my mouth with my sleeve for the whole journey. Those 30 minutes felt like hours. I’d let Joe down all his life, now I was willing to do anything for him.
Ive turned one dream into a poem, and another into a weird short about death.
On one hand dreams can help distill powerful themes and symbolism, on the other hand it takes just as much work to flesh out as any other idea.
I'm writing an entire novel sparked by a dream I had. It was really abstract and strange but the visual got me excited.
I don't remember my dreams too often, or if I do, I forget them by midday. The dream I mentioned before was simply two people dancing in a poorly lit room alone, and the woman was flickering and fading in and out. I thought it was compelling, so I decided to figure out their story.
Actually, I'm doing the same thing as Sparrow. I had a dream that the earth was dying, and because of the way it fell apart, it released a gas that got everyone incredibly intoxicated. Everyone was acting like they were on ecstasy, and people (for some reason) began to congregate at my college. It was a very sensual, thrilling dream.
Oh, and my first completed short script was about a recurring dream I have that finally concluded. It was a person I love driving, me in the passenger seat, and we always started to go off a cliff before I woke up. The last time I had it, though, we actually fell and I heard my own voice narrating an inner monologue about death and God and final moments, and I woke up and immediately turned it into a script. I even saw the "screen" fade to black and I Remember by Damien Rice start playing.
I have a shit ton of weird dreams, lots of which I'll probably write up here.
A portion of the novel I'm working on stemmed from a dream I had, passed out on the floor in my son's bedroom, in which the character Christian Troy from Nip/Tuck was being interviewed by the devil, who appeared to him in the guise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I'm actually pretty sure it wasn't the real FDR, but more likely an actor portraying him in a movie I saw at some point, since I have no clue what the real FDR looked like.
Let's just say I've refined the idea a little bit before putting it into my novel, for better or for worse I'm not sure yet.
I try not to play with dreams for fear that they may come true somehow, like in a spilled chemistry set type scenario. The times I've waken from something beautiful yet frightening and write that shit down, it's obvious that the imagery is just too raw and if I think about that stuff consciously it's going to take years to work out rationally. The dreamworld is some serious business, you don't want those creatures crossing fields.
The most prominent dream-to-literature experiment I've done was nearly 4 years ago. I was working 14 hour shifts, working out too much and reading 2-3 books a week, studying greek mythology (A passion reinvigorated by those cheesy Percy Jackson books.) Was really into the Hundred-Handed Ones myth at the time. Had a dream, started off in a snowy whiteout, streetlamp appears with a dude in a parka playing saxophone in a very Kauro Abe sort of way. This lead into me watching three critics, sort of in an Iron Chef manner, judging very real and obscure memories of my life on their aesthetic value and either rejecting or accepting them into some collective record. I assume a lot of those memories are lost to me forever now; don't know, can't remember. Feels sort of like seperating egg yolks from the whites. A beautiful dream that lead into an obsessive nightmare of literary translation and real life portents. Dream knowledge is best left in its obfuscation. No dream interpretation from me, no lucid dreaming techniques. There are much better heroes than me to battle those kind of grotesque ideas in the subconscious world where they belong. There be goddamn dragons.
Why? What kind of dreams are you guys having?
But I do want them crossing fields. I want Jaz Coleman and Ariana Reines to ride Duugggath'Rs around the block while I take notes.
@JY sounds more like a Simpsons episode than a dream.
Whenever anyone talks about dreams, it reminds me of this:
and the following scene where Brock has a vision of the Hot Dolphin!
