Process & Inspiration: Storify Your Dreams

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Dreams are a favorite source of inspiration for me. They have given me some wonderful stories – usually by offering up bits and pieces that eventually patchwork themselves together, and once by serving up an entire novel.

But dreams are tricky. Dream logic is a law unto itself and rarely translates with ease to any sort of story logic. Faithfully adhering to a dream almost always results in a broken story. Pulling a story out of dream can be hard. It’s something I’ve struggled with for years, so I’d like to share the process that currently works for me.

My dreams – the ones I want to write into stories – are wild things, breathless and beautiful. Waking from them is painful. The story always extends beyond anything I dream . . . or at least remember dreaming.

Few dreams retain a sense of coherence upon waking, whether through my faulty memory or because dream logic deemed such things unnecessary. I record the dreams as soon as possible to avoid losing more of it. They emerge as a stream of conscious prattle, including ideas and musings on how details might relate or connect. I worry less about getting every minute detail and more about capturing whatever stands out: a sound or smell, a setting, a relationship. If I capture even a little of the heady sense of the dream, I can rekindle that feeling whenever I reread the words.

By that point, I’ve developed a better, more distinct idea of people and places. Not all of them, but enough to begin shaping the skeleton of a story. Events, relationships, transitions, all jumbled and mixed together, most likely incomplete.

Then I break them apart. I do this in my head, or by listing each on paper. If you’re a notecard person, I recommend using them here. Put each event, person, place, whatever jumps out at you on its own card, physically split them up and rearrange them. Not only will you likely discover new progressions and relationship, but separating the individual elements breaks them out of the non-structure of dream logic. They become more malleable to story logic and structure.

The stories I am left with after this stage often have holes, gaps to be filled in. Often the premise seems ludicrous, like my vampire-run theme park in rural Maine. But they’re workable story, which is more than what I woke up with.

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