Fantastic Stories and Where to Find Them

Lately, I’ve been paying closer attention to my dreams. They’ve inspired a few of my stories, but I find that I have to get at them in the right way if I want to make any use of them.

I try to write a story a week. This week’s story, which I’m still working on, was inspired by a dream. The dream is months, maybe years old now. I was on a village street on Mars. Yeah, Mars. And I saw something intriguing at the end of the street. Of course, for the sake of that intrigue, I’m not going to reveal it here. Give me a chance to get it published!

Point is, dreams can have a powerful impact on a writer’s ability to create. But they’re slippery.

When I was a teenager, I tried writing my dreams down in a “dream journal.” I didn’t enjoy it much. It felt odd, like I was clinging too tightly to something better left behind. I could never recreate the full complexity of my dreams.

Most dreams are like that, I think. They make for poor source material as complete units because you can’t grasp them as complete units in the first place. For example, the dream surrounding that village street on Mars is nothing like the story I’ve made up for it. I don’t even remember the rest of that dream.

Dreams as such should not be relied upon to inspire stories. They’re too chaotic, disconnected, and ephemeral. (Of course, the writer might be going for that effect, but I am not interested in such a writer’s work. Alice in Wonderland and A Voyage to Arcturus were as far as I was willing to go into the bizarre depths of any one person’s mind.)

Instead, I think that snatches of dreams are where writers can find fantastic stories. These snatches or “bits” of dreams are the images that have stuck with us over time. The bits are what are important. Entire dreams don’t transfer well to paper. They’re slapped together from whatever’s floating around in our heads when we finally get to sleep. A writer doesn’t want the whole dream for his story. He only wants the part that really stuck with him, the images that he recalls without even trying. They just pop up, sometimes over years, because they attach to him very, very deeply. That’s the stuff worth transferring to paper.

The images that stick in your mind did so for a reason. Discovering that reason is not necessary, though. We should not psychoanalyze ourselves. Instead, I find it better to hone in on the emotions underlying the bit of the dream I remember. For example, I recall strong emotions of safety, mystery, and tranquility when I think of my “walk” down that village street on Mars. But the safety, I remember, would have ended if I went to the place at the end of the street. (In the dream, I never did go there. In my story, though, I did.) Safety, mystery, tranquility, danger. These strong emotions, attached to images, helped me shape the story I built around this bit of a dream.

After identifying the images that have stuck and the emotions attached them, it becomes the work of the writer’s conscious mind to build the story. Like I said, the “story” of the entire dream doesn’t transfer well, but when a writer takes a bit of a dream and consciously works to create a story around it, that’s when the magic happens. I’ll put it another way. The “bit of dream” is full of our own deep convictions, which our subconscious turned into unforgettable images and powerful underlying emotions. We might not be able to determine what convictions a particular image conveys, but again, that’s why I said not to worry about the psychoanalytic part. We’re not after that. We’re after the emotional power behind it, which the image creates as we relive it. That’s the springboard. From that, we realize the potential of that conviction through conscious effort. That is, we turn the images and emotions into a well-crafted story. It’s like finding a hot ember and building a fire pit for it, a place for the ember to become the blaze it’s capable of becoming.

Bits of dreams are fantastic sources for stories, so long as they really stick in your heart and soul and you go about sharing them in a conscious, deliberate way. It’s not a matter of getting the whole dream locked down. Instead, the goal is to latch onto that part that has always stuck with you, then share it through a story that lets readers latch onto it, too. That’s what I’m experimenting with lately. I hope to share some of these dream-inspired stories soon.

What kinds of dreams have you remembered over the years? Have you made any of them into stories?

 

Check out my fantasy novelette, Upholder, free to read now.

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Thanks for reading.