Riddle you this...

Lantern Jack · Mar 1, 2007

If you wrote out a dream, figment for figment, is that considered non-fiction or fiction, seeing how it never actually happened, although dreams have been recorded for posterity, from King Solomon to William Blake to William Butler Yeats?

There you go. Wrap your noodle round that one :welcome:

emeraldcite · Mar 1, 2007

If you write the dream as it occured, I guess it would be fiction. If you write the dream from your perspective of having the dream (In my dream the other night...), I guess it would be nonfiction.

ETA: More simply: the dream itself is fiction, you having the dream is nonfiction.

MidnightMuse · Mar 1, 2007

I'm using macaroni. It doesn't really wrap all the way around.

But I'd agree with Emeraldcite. She's probably got angel hair pasta or some other longer noodle goin' there.

veinglory · Mar 1, 2007

What emeraldcite said. A dream is your brain telling you a story, the story is fiction, the telling is fact.

Lantern Jack · Mar 1, 2007

I disagree. I believe dream is a form of memory, an otherly form of reality. Dreams have a substantial effect on the psyche. In many ways, dreams are more substantial than what happens to us in the outside world. The inner realms are just as physical as the outer ones

PeeDee · Mar 1, 2007

Lantern Jack said:
I disagree. I believe dream is a form of memory, an otherly form of reality. Dreams have a substantial effect on the psyche. In many ways, dreams are more substantial than what happens to us in the outside world. The inner realms are just as physical as the outer ones

Er. Then why ask? Haven't you just answered your own question...?

I dig that dreams are memory, because most of mine involve having super-powers, lightsabers, and avoiding zombies. It means I've had way more life experiences than I thought I had.

Will Lavender · Mar 1, 2007

I'm not sure dreams could ever truly be recounted in the manner they happened. Details are forgotten, pieces of the narrative disappear. I've heard that light touching the skin deadens the ability to remember dreams; if the dreamer awakens in a well-lighted room, he'll forget whole chunks of the thing. (In a Kathe Koja novel called Strange Angels I read years ago, the main character sleeps in the darkest room possible to intensify his dreams.)

Of course, that slippage happens with memories as well.

But dreams are still more slippery than that. I think their...vagueness makes them intrinsically fiction.

PeeDee · Mar 1, 2007

Will, the idea of light affecting dreams is fascinating, and I love it. I don't know what to do with it (if anything) but it's the sort of thing that'll sit in my head and wait to have a use someday. Thankyew.

Will Lavender · Mar 1, 2007

PeeDee said:
Will, the idea of light affecting dreams is fascinating, and I love it. I don't know what to do with it (if anything) but it's the sort of thing that'll sit in my head and wait to have a use someday. Thankyew.

I got that from a writer named Heinz Insu-Finkl.

He was a teacher at the school where I got my MFA. He told the most fascinating stories about...anything.

He once talked about how most everyone dreams in third-person because of film. Before movies, everybody dreamed in the first-person -- from their own perspective. After the advent of movies and television, people started seeing themselves from different perspectives in their dreams -- at a remove.

Like they were viewing themselves through a camera lens.

PeeDee · Mar 1, 2007

That's also interesting and logical enough, and it could be accurate. I'd certainly give it more credence than most of Sigmund Freud's stuff...

Zoombie · Mar 1, 2007

PeeDee said:
Will, the idea of light affecting dreams is fascinating, and I love it. I don't know what to do with it (if anything) but it's the sort of thing that'll sit in my head and wait to have a use someday. Thankyew.

Maybe you can have the made up invention of negative light make dreams become real. Or is that really stupid?

I used to have dreams, but I don't anymore. The ones I remember always distress me because I feel like I've been gone for a long time and I can't figure why it's only the next day. The first one I remembered was inspired by Doom, and it was a nightmare, and it was in first person. Maybe video games and first person shooters will bring back the first person dream narrative. I'm going real off topic aren't I?

The answer is, if you write about the dream, then it's dream fiction. Obvious.

johnzakour · Mar 2, 2007

To highjack the thread a bit, when I was reading Dragon Riders of Pern, all the characters in my dreams talked with the same accent as the characters in the book.

To answer the question, if I wrote about one of my dreams it would be pure pulp fiction as I write pulp and would never write about one of my dreams.

Will Lavender · Mar 2, 2007

Oddly, I almost never dream.

Once or twice a month.

PeeDee · Mar 2, 2007

I dream every night, and it's always got pictures and story and people, and it's usually quite strange. It's frequently disturbing, but nightmares and really freakish images don't scare me (and certainly don't scare me awake) for whatever reason.

Oddly, the only dream in recent memory that scared me awake was I dreamt I was getting a needle slid slowly into me. I do not like needles, to understate the matter.

Zoombie: Why not write that short story? Go for it.

As for what video games inspire in dreams...Here's about it.

Meerkat · Mar 2, 2007

There was an intriguing sci fi novel about thirty years ago--I wish I could recall the author--in which the hero becomes lost in Appalachia, and encounters someone very familiar looking. He realizes this is Snuffy Smith or Lil' Abner, in the flesh. The book goes on to account for every imaginary character HAVING to become real, somewhere in reality....sort of a primative many universes idea of if a thing can happen, it must happen, somewhere.

So your dreams ARE nonfiction, Lantern Jack. I hope for the latest universe affected, that they were good ones.

TsukiRyoko · Mar 2, 2007

It all depends on how you write it. If you write it in the perspective of reality, than it'd be fiction. If you start out with reality and put emphasis on it being a dream, then it's non-fiction.

TsukiRyoko · Mar 2, 2007

Pete, dear Pete. WTF with the avatar, man? I saw PeeDee and expected the happy avatar. But no, of course not, you had to go and get all morbid-horror on me and cause me to almost pee myself. Thanks a lot, man. Thanks.

jdparadise · Mar 2, 2007

Either way, it's fiction.

Perceptions have little to do with reality: red isn't red but rather the perception of red; sound isn't sound but rather the perception of sound; touch is the firing of neurons interpreting pressure. Give someone schizophrenia and the voices in their head are very real--non-fictional, even though the rest of us say the folks are crazy and the voices unreal.

Granting that to be the case, than "reality" itself is, on an individual level, fictional--a narrative interpretation of external stimuli shaded by experience, capabilities, and physiological limitations/gifts. Dreams, then, being already-interpreted narrative re-interpreted and re-contexted, are just as fictitious as reality, and just as real.

:: grin ::

gp101 · Mar 2, 2007

Lantern Jack said:
I disagree. I believe dream is a form of memory, an otherly form of reality..... The inner realms are just as physical as the outer ones

You mean me and Jenna Jamison actually did... no, I'd remember that. Lantern... you're cruel.

johnzakour · Mar 2, 2007

Will Lavender said:
Oddly, I almost never dream.

Once or twice a month.

You most likely dream. You just don't remember. You can always go to a sleep clinic get hooked up to an EEG, when you wake up you can look at the printout and see a lot of alpha wave (I believe -- it's been a long time since I took these kinds of classes) jumps while you're dreaming.

Will Lavender · Mar 2, 2007

johnzakour said:
You most likely dream. You just don't remember. You can always go to a sleep clinic get hooked up to an EEG, when you wake up you can look at the printout and see a lot of alpha wave (I believe -- it's been a long time since I took these kinds of classes) jumps while you're dreaming.

You're right.

I read an article on writing not long ago where the author said, "When I come to dream sequences, I skip over them."

He went on to say that dream sequences are too easy. There are no rules, no boundaries. No logic. A writer could describe anything and it would be permissible.

Don't know if I agree, but it's an interesting point.

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