Using Dreams In Your Writing

Well, I was supposed to have attended the Mile Hi Con today, but ended up unable to effectively fight off a cold. Sure, I could sit around a talk like the next person, but getting on the road to Denver might have been, well, adventurous, to say the least. So, I’m forced to sit at home, rather than attend the convention. My apologies to those at Mile Hi Con for being unable to make it.

 To that end, I thought, huh—why not blog about my perspectives on the topic? So, here it is. It’s kinda long, but was intended to have been an hour panel.

 First off, my credentials: I’ve been writing fiction for a while, and have a book, Sleepwalkers, that is exactly about this topic. I write about the supernatural (an order of existence beyond that scientifically visible) and the paranormal (experiences that lack scientific explanation), but in a more “real-life” way. I try to bend and warp and twist concepts and give new perspectives to things, like UFOs, ghosts, murder. Dreams. I’ve been interviewed on local and Internet radio, and presented at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in Colorado Springs.

 I love messing around with reality in my writing, and dreams and the dream structure provide an excellent medium for that. And I’m talking about more than just documenting a dream word-for-word in a story. I mean giving a freaky, or off-center structure (subtly or not-so subtly) to your work. Analyze your dreams not only for content, but how they’re structured. How they give you the images you experience. How their images flow from one “scene” into the next. How they made you feel. How they gave you a different perspective into something.

 But, perhaps even before you can do this, you must also define what you view as reality…and what you view as the dream, or unconscious, world. Do you feel one is more real (or important) than the other? One influences the other—and in what direction (i.e., does reality influence dreams, do dreams influence reality—or is it a two-way street)?

 How do you want dreams and reality to interact with each other? Do you want it to be all “spooky,” and whatnot, or do you want it to not be immediately recognizable that you’re “in” a dream? Again, it can be both, or some other version. The creation of the story will dictate its own creation. I tend to write in a more organic way, not dealing much with initial outlines (though I outline the hell out of things afterward!), so I write as the story moves through me. I allow the story to dictate its own rhythms. Allow the dreams to do the same.  See what they’re trying to show you. How they’re showing whatever information they have to show. And depending upon the author’s superpower at writing, a structure will emerge.

 In presenting a different point of view for a story, you do so for readers, and this, I feel, can actually lead to an expansion of consciousness. It allows others to see things differently. Opens and broadens perspectives, opens minds.

 Dare I say, give a new point of view on life itself?

 And in the end, if you do this skillfully enough, you don’t even have to answer the dreaded and oft-clichéd question:  was it a dream? You can leave it up to each reader for themselves to define that answer, based upon their own beliefs and interpretation. Sure, you can throw hints as which way you predominantly lean, but I say, keep the readers guessing—just a little. Some might disagree with me, here, but I think it all depends on author ability and the story itself. There are no hard rules for writing any story, except it should be engaging at some level.

 There were some prepared questions the Mi Hi Con moderators had, to help keep things rolling if things got slow, and I have my answers below:

 1) How dreams can be used as a resource/inspiration and making surreal sequences work in a story.

 Just like anything else. You dream of standing before the wide old ocean, sensing “unknowns” deep in the water, and create a story about underwater UFO-USOs or of another life as a slave who’d been sent overboard with ankle weights. But, what is inspiration? Where does it come from? What does any writer take away from any form of “inspiration”? Is it the content or the medium? Both? As mentioned above, you can use both the content and structure of a dream to add more meat to a story.

 And, again, use dreams more than just as a mere relation of unconscious or flight-of-fancy events. Structure it into a story…use it as a different way to relate/view your story. Example: Where the Wild Things Are. The book and the movie: study how the story was delivered (as well as how the movie was delivered, which is far different than the book—it was far more creepy and dark, for one thing) and how it was different than some other way of delivering a story idea.

 Do you think visually? Write your story visually? Are your dreams more visually presented? Emotive? Conceptual? How are your dreams presented to you, and use that structure as a storytelling method.

 2) Do you use dreams in your stories as foreshadowing, to offer psychological insights into the character, or in some other way?

 Yes to all. I use dreams not only as content, but also as structure. In one of my manuscripts I did lots of foreshadowing with visions of a barren landscape and messed-up family life, to name some examples. And I made them seem creepily realistic, so—to a point—the readers wouldn’t know if what I was showing was real or “imagined.” And is “imagined” any less real of an issue than the everyday world?

 Dreams are more than content—look at them as methods of storytelling.

3) Do you get inspiration from your own dreams for stories? Examples?

I’ve included dreams into my writing—in Sleepwalkers, I’ve included several, like the dark figure in the deep, dark barn, and the ocean and backpack dreams—but so far I have not had a dream, as in a go-to-sleep-and-wake-up-the-next-morning kinda thing, where I write up a story from that. I seem to get my inspiration during the day, I guess you could say. But as one begins to look deeply into dreams...what are they, anyway? I’ve had conscious dreams. I’ve been totally awake in my dreams. Does that shoot down the paradigm we’ve been discussing, because everyone’s assuming sleeping, unconscious dreams? I think dreams are an unconscious life we tap into, asleep or awake, so I use that as my baseline.

 4) How might dreams be misused in a story?

Just like anything else an author might misuse. Overuse? Heavy-handed foreshadowing. The old “And then s/he woke up.” You don’t want readers to feel cheated in that “everything was made up,” which is actually kinda ironic, cause we’re most likely talking fiction here, where everything is made up! But if you’re going to use dreams, make them real, an honest-to-goodness part of the story that’s not meant to be sneezed at. Make dreams—the unconscious realm—as important and needed to the story as anything else, so that without these elements...you simply do not have the story. This is where an author’s “superpowers” come into play.
 

5) Can dreams be overused in a story?  How?

Pretty much like anything else. It’s a method for story delivery as well as content. Like anything overused, be it a word or phrase, in this case it could be a specific [recurring] dream, on overused dream structure that worked great once, but not 20 times, or any other “overuse” issue. Writers need to subtly work in the dream like anything else in a story. Make it part of a story. See above response.

6) How do you avoid cliché within your dream sequences?

Cliché: Something that has become overly familiar or commonplace.
Part of being aware of what is cliché is reading more. Seeing what is already out there. 
Think of new ways of presenting a dream, and give the reader some credit (i.e., don’t have to constantly hit him/her across the face with “the dream ended, and...”; you just go to the next scene).
7) What writing techniques do you use to differentiate dream sequences from ordinary introspection?
I try to write “weird” anyway, so, depending on what I’m trying to do...write “weirder”? Every situation is unique. I don’t have any cookie-cutter guidance. It depends on the story itself. Do you want the dream sequence to stand out, or be more interwoven into the story? If you want it to stand out, find some way to do so. Otherwise write it more like the bulk of your story so readers can’t really figure out if it’s one or the other until later.
In one manuscript, I had written out dream sequences like a mini (TV) script. Formatted it on the page as a TV script. Well, my agent found that distracting and asked that I reconsider that, and I did. It was far better the way I rewrote it, more creepier. I kept the dream-sequence angle, but wrote it out as regular book text.
In writing like a dream, one could go [more] heavy on the imagery and emotion, since in dreams everything has more intensity. Even to the point of absurdity.
Lean on the incongruous...in a subtle way.
Many times I don’t try to make them all that different, because I write weird to begin with and want to play around with what’s supposed to be real and what’s supposed to be fake. But many times I’ll actually try to write a dream sequence just like it was real life (in my story), because I’m messing with perceptions to begin with, then throw something in there to make someone question whether or not the dream is real. Sometimes I’ll just throw in a dream, in all its weirdness, right in there and make no bones about it. It depends on the story.

8 ) Are there things to avoid when writing dreams into stories?  Can you make a dream sequence too strange or surreal?

Again—and these are good questions—but, it all depends on the story and an author’s ability. You have to create something that people can follow, which is also a personal preference (one person’s bane is another’s boon). I feel it’s okay to write something a little oblique that is difficult to follow, if it suits the story and is brief. If most readers are like me, they won’t drop a book just because they don’t understand one or two things in a book. But, if you write the entire book like that, then you got issues!

9) Aside from the film version of The Wizard of Oz, can you name an entire story that’s effectively a dream, or is that just a cop out? [Spoiler alert: Next–or Total Recall?]

For me, this goes back to what the author’s and reader’s beliefs about dreams are. Do they both feel dreams are a “cop out”? My sense is that if a writer does feel dreams are not real, not important, they’re not going to spend much time and energy on them. But if readers feel that, and the writer doesn’t, then it’s the writer’s job to effectively keep the story from becoming a perceived “cop out.” Cop outs depend upon a lot of things: beliefs about dreams, how compelling is the story, w/o regard to whether parts of a story are dreams, and how good of a writer is the author.
I don’t consider myself all that well-read, so little is coming to mind about entire stories being dreams, but I offer these samples as dream-related in structure and content:
Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Convenant the “Unbeliever” series?
Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead?
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five?

Again, apologies I was unable to attend the panel today, but feel free to post a comment or ask a question and I’ll do my best to get back to each one. Thanks for stopping by!