I am a writer and I hate dream sequences. More than any other convention or cliche, dream sequences are the stupidest thing ever cooked up by the author’s imagination. I avoid them wherever I can. I avoid them like a river of lava. And if the time comes when I absolutely have to set foot in it, when I’ve exhausted all other options for alternate routes, backtracking, and even digging under the earth, I still don’t do it. Nothing wastes more of the readers time than going into a dream. I wish more creative writing teachers and guru told students to avoid this disease of books. Here’s why: 1) Dream…
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My, I mean, The Mind is Powerful
I didn’t use to dream. I never really knew why, but it never really bothered me. Why should it? Then I got a new pillow, a nice big firm fluffy one. Now I dream all the time. I don’t know what causes it. Maybe my pillow before was too flat, and it wasn’t allowing enough blood circulation to my head to allow me to dream. Maybe I should be thankful I didn’t have a stroke. But the realization that I could dream again was wonderful. Of course, then I stopped dreaming. Probably because my pillow settled. So now I sleep with two pillows to keep my head upright. But I…
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Dreams Last Night
You know you’re a writer when you have a dream that you’re in charge of a arranging a bunch of boats a la Battleship, only all the boats are made of words. And they’re words from the story you’re writing. And you have to steer them so that they don’t touch, otherwise the words will get tangled (all those spaces inbetween) and you’ll never get the boats apart. Then the second dream was about me rejoining a Tae Kwon Do chapter in my neighborhood after a 10 year, 20 pound absence. Everyone had a different colored uniform – red, blue, black – and you could have (maybe earn) patches like…
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Bad Dreams Lately
Bad dreams lately. My stomach’s been feeling bad lately. I’ve been reading too much disturbing stuff – Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, The Button Bin, Baby Doll, Watchmen. These are award winning stories, and they’re fucking me up. 10 year olds having sex. Pedophilia. Incest. Rape. I feel like an alien that has to decide whether humanity is worth saving or not. I need some barbecue and snuggles. I feel like watching a nice movie like “Short Circuit” or “Finding Nemo” that might make me feel better, would end up making me feel worse, because those dark images would still be tumbling in my head like a hamster in a wheel.…
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Dream about Stephen King
Sunday night I had a dream that I was on a cruise ship (I have a lot of cruise ship dreams. I must want to go back there). I think it might have been some kind of writing convention on the ship, because these are the parts I remember. I remember reading a blackboard list of all the people who were there. I don’t know if they were writers or not, but the only name I recognized was Stephen King, so clearly I was excited. He doesn’t make too many public appearances any more, and except for his heinous vandalism 🙂, hasn’t been in the media except for book releases.…
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Dream = Great Story Fodder
Had a dream last night, that was, well, let’s just say it provoked many emotions, which are strange and foreign to me (not these emotions, but emotions in general). Don’t care to mention what it was about, but I’m trying to use it in my story, using it to fuel a character, who didn’t have much characterization in the first place. This is changing her into a bit of a different character than the ghostly image I had in the first place, but she’s not too important of a person in the first place, just a macguffin. With these new developments, though, I’m thinking of fleshing her out more. Might…