Sold any nightmares?

Hi. You hit a sore spot there. I love dreams, and try to capture as many of them as I can. But dreams generally don't have plots, and are therefore unacceptable to most publications. In dream logic you just drift or run from place to place and see a lot of cool stuff. To me it's agonizing to be forced to make them conform to the norms of "modern fiction", just to make a few bucks. I find that if I write them as poetry there's a lot more leeway, maybe not a ton of markets for the dark stuff, or more than $5 or $10 a pop. But it gets them out there. Of course, some poetry markets still want narrative works.

I also keep a dream journal, and find that they can make nice additions to collections of stories. Sometimes a dream-related anthology comes along. Lately, I've been using my backlog of dreams in my weird newsletter ("Dark Windows") where the main goal is to blur the line between reality and imagination.

If you keep looking, you can probably find uses for them. Just don't let a lack of markets discourage you. Or you can channel the nightmares while writing conventional stories -- they're a good source for filling in the mad details as your story moves along.