The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of (gets very weird very quickly)

You know when you wake up in the middle of a dream, and it’s still very much vivid in your mind? And you think, ‘right, I’ll commit that to memory right now so I can think about it in the morning’, and then just fall asleep again and forget the whole thing when you wake up again?

Well, that’s why I keep a notes document on my iPad, right next to my bed. (Not a notebook, as it’s got a screen-light and it spares me fumbling with more buttons and a pencil.) Because sometimes I wake up from a dream and thing ‘hang on, there might be a story in this one’. So I flail my way over to the iPad and blearily write whatever it was down for reference, and very occasionally one of those ideas might actually turn out to be alright when I wake up.

So far… no, consulting the list I’ve not actually written any of the dreams up. There are some decent seeds of ideas but obviously they’re all distorted by being dreams, and thus bounded by no internal logic whatsoever. But there are ok bits there sometimes, and I might actually work on some these days. Here, then, are some highlights – not all good ones…

The Doctor Who episodes

I’ve had several Doctor Who stories come to me while asleep and they are almost all rubbish. We’ve had the ‘planet of 12 sunsets’, which is a nice image but doesn’t have much else to work with; there’s the one starring Daniel Kaluuya with a very generic ‘evil humanoid alien’ plot; and there’s the most recent one, which is also the most recent dream I had… which actually might work, I reckon. I just need to wait until Ncuti Gatwa’s been the Doctor for a little while so I can see how the character works. Or maybe I’ll just write it for Paul McGann.

And then there’s the best episode of all, which is simply titled: ‘Ood Cop, Bad Cop’.

The Two Kings

There’s no proper chronology to this notes doc but I’m pretty sure I must have been at university for this dream, because I’ve written ‘Nero regent vs Hadrian warlord on campaign’ and then plotted out a story of inter-imperial rivalry between two brother rulers. One gets the political intrigue, the other gets the Big War, and they jockey for position at the top of Not-Rome for a few hundred pages.

It’s got potential, I think, though I’d need to either fully lean into Roman history and try and find a proper pair of rulers to write about (daunting), or distance it from just being ‘Rome in Space’ with some different cultural influences. Which is again difficult for me, because if in doubt I always throw some Roman references in to build up a world’s history.

The Deeps

Submarines? In my science fiction? It’s more likely than you think. But this is not that submarine story, or the other submarine story that I may or may not be working on right now: this one’s a bit more grounded. Or watered, I guess. Anyway: some sort of war on within and underneath a world’s oceans, featuring experiments in weaponizing sea creatures, like in Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic and, uh, real life. But the big twist of course is that the sea creatures are also at war and looking for human allies, against something suitably large and Cthulhu-like at the bottom of the sea…

Again this one might have legs, or flippers. It’d be a lot of submarining research, but there could be potential here – there are just a lot of coincidental similarities between this and current/recent projects, so if I do ever get stuck into this one it won’t be for a while. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

Then there are all the other weird ones: two planets near the heat death of the universe, alien bounty hunters, the prison break comedy and the spy film with Hugh Dennis and Adam Driver and a… robot bee.

Yeah, some of these might need a little more work.