Do you take things for your stories/poems from dreams?

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

I rarely do, though I wish I could write out a dream and even do it a little bit of justice, I don't believe I can. (I have some seriously insane dreams) but just last night I dreamed of something that seems so great, not as a story itself but an element of a story anyway.

Sympathy Serum. It is drops you put in your eyes, and not only will it make you cry it will reveal those things to you that you should sympathize or empathize with and you will understand and feel it.

I have no idea how or where to use this, but it just seems like a great element in some story somewhere.

do you ever dream of things that you use later?

MidnightMuse · Mar 19, 2007

I do all the time. Bits and pieces, not whole entire dreams. I think mostly it's from thinking hard on a story line or character idea while trying to fall asleep, then the brain keeps going. I'm lucky in that I dream a lot and remember quite a few of them. It's very helpful when I'm stuck in a plot and need to figure something out, I'll often get lucky and wake up with the perfect idea that came from a snippet of a dream.

I do wish somehow we could replay our dreams like a movie, so we could analyze all the weirdness and odd bits that pop in there sometimes!

KTC · Mar 19, 2007

in a word...yes.

i dreamed of sudoku yesterday...but i was aligning my life and the people in it. it was crazy. i can sudoku the hardest one in about 3 minutes flat...and i did about 10 of them in a row just before bed...to freak my wife out, i guess. (she has a hard time with the easiest ones.) anyway...i wrote a couple poems this morning from my dreams.

i always borrow scenes from dreams for fiction. always.

PeeDee · Mar 19, 2007

Sometimes, while tying to understand something I dreamt (a mostly useless endeavor at best) I'll come with something I'll use in a story. I've only ever written one short story based entirely on a dream I had, and that was because it was menacing and strange and it kept recurring, and I wanted to know why.

I had a dream a few weeks ago where two little boys were eating a dead human man and one looked up at me and held out a handful of..er...bloody meat and said "Try the bread."

I've been knocking that around, trying to figure out what it meant. At worst, it's a zombie story. At best, I think it's something more.

It may not be anything at all. Dreams sometimes just aren't.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

I have some pretty gross and disturbing dreams. In fact, nightmares are one of the big reasons I am now a hopeless insomniac. Every now and then there is something I can make use of, and occasionally I can understand what it indicates about my life. sometimes its just a tidbit to save for later. Something I never would have thought of while fully awake.
Worth pursuing sometimes. Sometimes I just hold on to them and wait.

OverTheHills&FarAway · Mar 19, 2007

With few exceptions, everything I've written began as a dream.

Most of the time the finished product hardly resembles the dream, since I have to apply real-world logic for them to make sense. Like once, I dreamt I woke up in my old childhood bedroom as a little boy, and an evil queen wouldn't let me leave. I had a magic snowglobe full of sparkly green specks, and it was thunder-storming. Through a thousand mutations, that became a historical novel set in mid-fifth century Wales.

But sometimes I dream entire plots. Like my current WIP. Yesterday I wrote a scene that I had dreamt, verbatim, back in October. The characters, the dialogue, all of it came from my twisted subconscious.

Being able to use my dreams didn't come without a lot of work, though. For years I kept a dream journal, and would write them down every morning or on the bus to school or during class, whenever. That helped me remember them, dream more vividly, and now sometimes I can control them. It's pretty wicked when you can go to sleep thinking about some problem with your plot, and get to work out different solutions in your dreams.

I also wake up with songs stuck in my head, songs that don't exist, and I eventually work them out on guitar and voila! I'm a songwriter. That's how Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday, I believe, except he called it "Scrambled Eggs" at first.

Does any of this make me weird? :e2hammer:

Namatu · Mar 19, 2007

I don't remember my dreams. All that creativity going to waste!

ChaosTitan · Mar 19, 2007

I often have very vivid, very sequential dreams. I made it a habit years ago to write down the ones I recall in detail. I have notebooks full of dreams. Many will never see the light of day, but there are lots of good ideas in there just waiting for a story. I don't have a finished story based on a dream, but several starts and one in need of severe editing.

I suppose if I'm spending six to eight hours of my day asleep, I should get something useful out of it.

PeeDee · Mar 19, 2007

chaostitan said:
I often have very vivid, very sequential dreams. I made it a habit years ago to write down the ones I recall in detail. I have notebooks full of dreams. Many will never see the light of day, but there are lots of good ideas in there just waiting for a story. I don't have a finished story based on a dream, but several starts and one in need of severe editing.

I suppose if I'm spending six to eight hours of my day asleep, I should get something useful out of it.

The worrying thing that I have, and perhaps you do too, is that I start to spot certain thematic elements that run through my various dreams, whether they're sequential or nod...

Probably a writer thing.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

One of the reasons I am now a hopeless insomniac is because I had so many vivid horrid nightmares. I never thought to use them, they were gross and disturbing, utterly frightening. When I got to the point of being "good enough" at it, I could insert cognitive thought into the dream (lucid dream) where I could tell myself "it's a dream. that doesn't make sense. It's only a dream" and when I would try to wake myself up, some hideous thing from the dream would follow me and scare the crap out of me then I would wake up for real. I finally realized that I'm really not very good at the lucid thing either.
There have been plenty of times they have stayed with me all day long, and I used to write down a lot of them, but found that the whole story was rarely worth writing, rather, pieces of them are excellent in story.
One of the long time favorites was flying. I loved that dream.
Re: recurring themes the intruders in my house, and the scary house on the hill, and the guy in the basement with dead people in the freezer, I could really do without them. I do have a lot of recurring elements, primarily: being cold (wearing very little, running barefoot on frozen ground, being chased, someone breaking into my house, basements with dead people, and people standing at the end of the bed, or in one case sitting on the bed and talking to me. Plain as day, there is a person in this room. One of them asked me if I knew who my friends were. Christ. I'd write about him if he didn't scare the hell out of me..

PeeDee · Mar 19, 2007

I wish I had that, Trish. I'm actually jealous. I used to have really terrifying nightmares, the ones that make you wake up in the middle of the night sweating and breathing hard.....and thirty seconds after waking up, as the terror passed, I loved it! I was always disappointed when I went back to sleep and the dream didn't resume.

I don't get nightmarish dreams anymore, or maybe I do and I just no longer qualify them as nightmares.

I suspect I have nightmares in the back of my mind sitting around going, "I don't get it, I did the whole taking out my eyeballs and making him eat them bit, and he didn't mind, he just said it was interesting...! And he wrote it down...! I just feel like I'm losing it, Chuck. Maybe I'm no good anymore..."

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

Pete, you can have the tall guy at the end of my bed if you want him. that was about 5 years ago and he still scares the crap out of me.
I was dreaming that I was running (yes, as a matter of fact, barefoot on frozen ground) because I was being chased. I got away from one bad guy and then I saw him dump water into this 5 gallon bucket of *stuff* and just like a weed, out came the new sprout of the same evil and he started chasing me. At some point I questioned this - not possible - it's a dream, wake up you idiot, it's just a dream, and I did (I thought) and I'm laying in my bed (thinking I'm awake but still dreaming) and my room looks just like it does at that time of night, and at the end of my bed is this man who looked 7 feet tall wearing all black, smoking, it's rolling up from his mouth and I can see it glowing in the light of the digital clock. He blows out smoke while I scamper to the head of the bed and he says, "Do you know who your friends are?" I scream bloody hell and then I really wake up, and he is gone.

Yea, you can have him.

ChaosTitan · Mar 19, 2007

PeeDee said:
The worrying thing that I have, and perhaps you do too, is that I start to spot certain thematic elements that run through my various dreams, whether they're sequential or nod...

Probably a writer thing.

You're not kidding. :tongue

I have noticed certain themes that continue to recur in my dreams. The odd part, though, is that I can usually connect those themes to something happening in my personal life. It's either novel related, health related, relationship related, you name it.

The things that worry me in my dreams are the elements I can't connect to my waking life. Bits of nightmares, especially. Dreams where I wake up and go "WTF???" or have to move my head because I've soaked the pillow with tears. But those are also the emotions that I want to remember. I want to write those dreams down, and somehow, in some fashion, recapture those emotions for my readers. To describe the incident in that nightmare that drove me to tears, or made me wake up with a choked scream.

It's just my overactive imagination talking to me, after all, so I try hard to remember and record. I don't always get it right...but sometimes.

PeeDee · Mar 19, 2007

That just belongs in a novel somewhere...

Sure, I'd take that in a heartbeat. I love dreams like that. They scare the crap out of me when I wake up (sometimes; sometimes I just wake up thoughtful) but five minutes later, I'm fine and happy about it.

Er...this probably means you're normal, and there's something wrong with me.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

And you can have the little girl that sat at the end of my bed. I couldn't crawl away fast enough. She was a cute kid, but incredibly ghostly and she had no business in my bedroom. Scared the crap out of me.

She's all yours.

the woman in all black that wandered through my house yelling down stairs calling out the names of my family members. (heh, down the stairs to the basement that I didn't have - she was actually yelling in the bathroom). leaving messages written on windows and pillows, I realized when I went upstairs to lock myself in my room that I didn't have a built in hall cabinet - "hey! this is only a dream. wake up, stupid." and sure enough I do, and I run through the house checking to make sure she's not still there and I again realize it's still a dream because that cupboard is still at the top of the stairs, I walked up the stairs anyway, and I see her behind me, long black dress flowing behind her around the corner, I scream bloody hell again, and I'm on my futon - shortly after I left and went for a drive.
I don't dig on that "intruder" thing.

You want her, too?

PeeDee · Mar 19, 2007

Honestly? Yes. Not to hijack your thread, but I actually have a use in a story of mine for these kind of things. If you don't mind.

...

You know what's interesting is, the dreams don't particularly scare me, but I'll be awake and roaming the house mostly in the dark, late at night. And for whatever reason, my imagination will build something really scary and put it in the dark closet I'm about to pass through, and suddenly I can't bring myself to set foot in there.

We were visiting my wife's family for a week or so, and I went out to their garage to get something from their big storage fridge they keep out there. And as I did so (not in the dark, mind you, a light was on) I suddenly had a clear image that in the passenger seat of the truck right next to me, a little pale boy was going to sit up. He would have no pupils, and his hair was floating around his head like he was underwater, and he would open a biiiiig round mouth and no sound would come out.

Scared the shit out of me. I left the garage and I stayed out for the rest of the night.

But if I had dreamed that, it wouldn't have bothered me at all.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

No I don't mind. BUt I'd love to read them when your done and if you want more detail, let me know. I'll pass along all the info I have.

And yes, I have moments like that too, Pete. Active imagination for terror apparently.
I was in a house, we were looking at renting, it was huge. the basement didn't scare me, in fact nothing did until I went upstairs and I saw a child falling over the hand rail. and the big walk in closet - I had some whacked out torture images in there. needless to say, out of consideration. No way in hell. I have no doubt that as I would have lived in that house, I would have had those images in those places over and over again.

Shadow_Ferret · Mar 19, 2007

Stew21 said:
One of the reasons I am now a hopeless insomniac is because I had so many vivid horrid nightmares. I never thought to use them, they were gross and disturbing, utterly frightening.

Are they kind of like the dream I had the other night? Two vampires were having a fight. (For some reason the smaller one was Tattoo, from Fantasy Island.) And the bigger one took the smaller ones head against a deli meat slicer and slices his head up until it was this little pile of sliced meat that still horribly looked like Hervé Villechaize's face.

But generally, no, I don't get my ideas from my dreams. It's rare that I remember them and then when I do they are like that.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

eeeeewwwww.....

OverTheHills&FarAway · Mar 19, 2007

Nightmares rule. I'd love it if I was chased by bad guys/gangsters/nazis every night . . . .

. . . . oh wait, I am! Either that, or my teeth fall out.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

OverTheHills&FarAway said:
Nightmares rule. I'd love it if I was chased by bad guys/gangsters/nazis every night . . . .

. . . . oh wait, I am! Either that, or my teeth fall out.

http://dreammoods.com/cgibin/teethdreams.pl?method=exact&header=dreamid&search=teethintro

One theory is that dreams about your teeth reflect your anxiety about your appearance and how others perceive you.

PeeDee · Mar 19, 2007

What a strange site.....

It doesn't say what deeper meaning there is in my dreams where I'm Spider-Man, though.

Stew21 · Mar 19, 2007

Very strange site. I found it one time when I was trying to figure out what a dream about mice and rats meant. Very odd; they said it depended on the color of the rat.

Little Red Barn · Mar 19, 2007

Stew21 said:
One of the reasons I am now a hopeless insomniac is because I had so many vivid horrid nightmares. I never thought to use them, they were gross and disturbing, utterly frightening. When I got to the point of being "good enough" at it, I could insert cognitive thought into the dream (lucid dream) where I could tell myself "it's a dream. that doesn't make sense. It's only a dream" and when I would try to wake myself up, some hideous thing from the dream would follow me and scare the crap out of me then I would wake up for real. I finally realized that I'm really not very good at the lucid thing either.
There have been plenty of times they have stayed with me all day long, and I used to write down a lot of them, but found that the whole story was rarely worth writing, rather, pieces of them are excellent in story.
One of the long time favorites was flying. I loved that dream.
Re: recurring themes the intruders in my house, and the scary house on the hill, and the guy in the basement with dead people in the freezer, I could really do without them. I do have a lot of recurring elements, primarily: being cold (wearing very little, running barefoot on frozen ground, being chased, someone breaking into my house, basements with dead people, and people standing at the end of the bed, or in one case sitting on the bed and talking to me. Plain as day, there is a person in this room. One of them asked me if I knew who my friends were. Christ. I'd write about him if he didn't scare the hell out of me..

Trish does your house have history? Sounds as if those are living nightmares...

Namatu · Mar 19, 2007

You're all pointing out reasons I'm glad I don't remember my dreams. The last nightmare type dream I had was that someone was in my apartment, opening and closing the closet door, and I woke up in bed, saw him, and decided I needed to hide under the bed or he'd kill me. Then I realized that that was stupid and I needed to do something or he'd kill me anyway. But all of my martial arts weapons were in the living room, past the Closet Man. The baseball bat was under the bed, but I wanted weapons.

Do you take things for your stories/poems from dreams?

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