The 'ol 'I got my plotline from a dream' thing?

A few times whole lucid dreaming I would conjure up interesting scenes that would help with character development. I have a hard time recalling dialogue, but the actions are easy to remember.

I've done that! Both times were horror novels. Dreamed up the world and situation and then developed it into a story.

I've had a few dreams that I've tried to turn into a story - and based on this thread, think we're not alone!

Ahahahahaa

*unrolls list of 35+ full novel ideas that came from dreams*

Just a few. *twitch*

The ideas always get modified. Dreams aren't exactly good at giving you a whole story, or a sensible one. Lots of plot holes or things that don't make sense, or sometimes I only remember bits and pieces and have to fill in the blanks myself. But I usually get a lot out of them. It works best for me when I fall back asleep for, like, an hour or so before I have to get up. Then the memory is most vivid, and the dreams tend to make the most sense. Sometimes I can combine two different dreams months or years apart to make a complete story concept. If I feel there's something that I can salvage from a dream, I write it down. Never know when all the pieces come together.

I will sometimes dream the solution to a plot problem I've been struggling to correct, but I don't think any ideas have come wholesale from dreams.

I'm with the majority here. I have woken up many times and thought, I have to get this down before I forget what happened. Some great ideas can come in dreamscapes, in my opinion anyway.

i've had dreams of one particular SCENE.....and then the story just happened to evolve around it, once i wrote it down...LOL

My partner (not a writer) regularly gets fully formed stories in his dreams. Beginnings, middles, ends, twists, the whole lot.

I get disconnected weirdness where the dialogue is snappy but the storyline is incomprehensible and stairs never work properly.

(Or I just dream about smut involving hot guys from the TV, but that's just between us alright?)

I certainly get story-related ideas while daydreaming, especially when induced by walking or hiking. One issue I've encountered, and it's tough to dismiss as coincidence, is that aspects of stories I've written later "come true" in reality. Makes me nervous to write.

msuss said:

I certainly get story-related ideas while daydreaming, especially when induced by walking or hiking. One issue I've encountered, and it's tough to dismiss as coincidence, is that aspects of stories I've written later "come true" in reality. Makes me nervous to write.

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Jeez, that would induce crippling writer's block in me!

Alternatively, this sounds like a great prompt!

Kinda like Maggie and Myrealana, maybe, I don't get whole plots or characters, but I do get help from my dreams with fixing plot issues and phrasing thoughts. The help is so reliable that, whenever I have the discipline to go to sleep thinking about my writing, rather than falling asleep listening to a podcast or Seth Meyers, I will wake with new ideas. Nearly guaranteed. Given quiet space, subconscious and conscious parts of our minds communicate. It's pretty awesome.

Yes, it's a matter of letting go of your conscious control, especially while writing a first draft, and allowing your subconscious mind to play with the material. Stephen King has described how when he's finished writing for the day he stops thinking about the story and lets "the boys in the basement" do their work.

I get ideas and sparks from dreams, such as imagery or compelling scenes or turns of phrase, though full stories with beginnings, middles, and ends (ones that make sense on waking - dream logic is an entirely different animal) are rare - not entirely unknown, but rare. I do, however, often find myself "writing" and "watching" the dream as I interact with it. Also had some dreams with cool soundtracks.

As others have mentioned, getting a waking-world story out of dreams generally takes some work. But there's definitely inspiration in them. I just have to be careful how obsessively I write them down; I get into phases where I have stress-dreams after the "cool" dream where I keep trying to write down the dream but can't form letters or can't get the pen to work - until by the time I wake for real the cool dream's gone and most of what I'm left with is the frustration of not having been able to write it down, save a few fragments.

Brightdreamer said:

As others have mentioned, getting a waking-world story out of dreams generally takes some work. But there's definitely inspiration in them. I just have to be careful how obsessively I write them down; I get into phases where I have stress-dreams after the "cool" dream where I keep trying to write down the dream but can't form letters or can't get the pen to work - until by the time I wake for real the cool dream's gone and most of what I'm left with is the frustration of not having been able to write it down, save a few fragments.

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OH GOD I'VE HAD THESE. Oh my god, they're the worst. Or the ones where you actually write them down and then go about your day but you were dreaming and didn't actually and now you can't remember.

@Maggie and @BrightDreamer, I'm kidding, and I'm totally not kidding: I feel like I'm gonna have a nightmare about this thread tonight.

Maggie Maxwell said:

*unrolls list of 35+ full novel ideas that came from dreams*

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Mine is 50+.
I've found since I've gotten into plotting and story that I tend to get excited and start tweaking my dreams (in my sleep) when I think there's potential. Like, ooo, good idea, but where's X characters' motivation? And how could I make those stakes more personal? In the background I think my little dream orchestrator is getting very annoyed with me.

I'm a dream tweaker too. I have lucid dreams a lot, and wish-fulfillment dreams. I have also dreamed while under anesthesia.

Last night, I was having a nice dream about visiting a giant brewery, and going upstairs to where the sample room was. I was looking forward to tasting a few but wondering why the characters in the dream weren't speaking normally -- they were making wheezy, raspy sounds. I woke up to discover my boyfriend was snoring.

I'm crazy. My entire 'autobiography' (note the quotation marks) is based on dreams. An entire alien planet... no, make that two planets, islands, oceans... continents, big cities. I had it so exact I even drew maps, but they disappeared. Some day I'll have to redraw them.

I find that I hardly ever remember my dreams, though I very much want to! I've thought about starting a dream journal so I can try and make my way to lucid dreaming. But I've heard sometimes attempts at lucid dreaming can result in night terrors? Having experienced night terrors, it makes me nervous to attempt lucid dreaming.

Most of my story ideas come from daydreaming.

I have had a recurring lucid dream since 2001 where I am in a beautiful library and I can take any book off the shelves and read a section of it, with almost perfect recall upon awakening. It's always the same library, and the books within it are always about the same world, its histories, heroes, etc. I started off just writing down notes about the dreams whenever I had them, but over the course of a few years I started to notice that everything fit together like a puzzle to create a bigger picture. That's how I've gotten almost all of the inspiration for my series. I guess you could say it's "fan-fiction" of that other world, since I use the same setting and some of the ideas from the dreams but the plots and some of the characters are my own.

Happens a lot to me. More often I dream of situations that, with appropriate modification to be less absurd, become plot elements within my stories.

Sometimes I wake up with whole book plots roughly outlined, or names of characters whom I feel I know intimately well. Some are so weird as to be unusable without extensive alterations, but a few are good almost as-is.