Using Dreams To Show Character

Dreams aren't real. Dreams are random. You have a HUUUGE believability factor to overcome.

A lot of the time when I dream I become a different person, or I do or say things I wouldn't necessarily (or wouldn't ever!) do in real life. The thing about dreams is, most of the time, you can't control what's going on or how you respond to it. In my opinion, a dream can't reliably reveal character. The character's waking reaction to the dream, on the other hand, could always offer insight into the way he or she thinks.

Yeah, I agree completely. I do things in dreams I would never, ever do in real life. Unless you were setting it up as some kind of specific vision I don't think it would work. That being said, you probably could do it as a vision if you wanted. Maybe as part of a ritual involving taking a special drug or something. I want to say there are some Native American rituals that are similar, but I don't recall enough to give details at the moment. Worth looking up if you really have your heart set on it.

Dreams are too incoherent to make that credible. They are also inevitably part of the character's experience- watching a scary film makes it likely that they will have a scary dream.
I've tried to do a dream vs. reality story and it doesn't really work.

Putting the character in that real-life situation is fine though.

A dream as characterization? It sounds more like treating a symptom than treating the actual problem. It would also tend to make you think you'd done good characterization because you did something in the dream, and then you'd still get comments that your characters are flat and continue to be frustrated. Characterization isn't just in one scene--it's throughout the book.

I think if you really wanted to do it, it would have to be one of those dreams where the character becomes aware that they're in a dream and is able to control what happens. But even then I don't think it would really compare with using actions while awake to reveal character.

However, one way you could use dreams is to show something that is bothering the character. E.g. if they are really stressed out about something, or there is another character that really annoys them, they could have a dream or nightmare that shows that.

I mistrust any idea sparked by a game, a flimsy makeshift fantasy built on the dregs of inspiration.

DwayneA said:

At the beginning of the game, your character's personality is determined by how he/she acts in a situation set before him/her in a dream, such as burning or sparing the citizens of a town when transformed into a monster, jumping off a tower or not, or deciding whether to attempt to save a man dying in the desert or abandoning him to die.

Can the same thing be done in a story where a character is placed in a situation and he/she reacts as such?

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If the player is controlling the character at this point in the game, the personality that is determined is not the character's, but is, instead, the player's.

Does the act define the character, or does the character define the act? For example, consider that there are two people who intentionally crashed a car into a tree and survived.

What is important is not the act itself, but the reasons for the act, the character's reaction to the act, and the emotional growth or collapse due to the act. The first person in the above example could be angry because he or she flunked a course, got expelled from college, decided to cope with the shame by attempting suicide, and failed in this attempt due to the air bag deploying. The second person could be just as angry because he or she realized, after crashing the car to relieve stress from a domestic dispute, that the car insurance purchased was not full coverage.

Characters can do almost anything, but their actions need justification.

DwayneA said:

Have you ever had a dream like this in real life?

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Well . . . if I ever do, I assume that I would act like I normally do because usually in my dreams I can not tell whether or not they are indeed dreams at the time of occurrence. And when I do eventually find out that I am in a dream, I usually become half-awake or completely awake, so what I would continue to do would become speculation and not actual action because I could then do almost anything without fear of consequence if i knew that I was in a dream--suggesting that what I later did would have no eventful meaning.

Though experimenting in your dreams can sometimes be fun, as you can act outside the norm.

Now I'm thinking of Nightmare on Elm Street.

I use a dream to introduce some characters to the reader that the MC hasn't meet yet.
They enter the MC's dream to save him from another character.