Bradel Brainstorming – Dream Sequences · 4:17pm Mar 13th, 2013
Gah. Teach me to try typing a blog straight into Fimfiction. One accidental press of the backspace key, and I lose half an hour of work.
So I've been catching up on some of the classics of Ponyfiction. About a month back, PoweredByTea turned me on to Device Heretic's "Eternal". Then, last week, Sunchaser finally convinced me to go read Varanus' "Composure". Both of these are excellent stories, and although Composure is incomplete and I'm only through three of the six extant chapters, I wholeheartedly encourage anyone with an interest to go check them out.
Reading Chapter 3 of "Composure" this morning, I started thinking about dream sequences and the different ways in which they can be put together. The aforementioned chapter of Varanus' story contains a very protracted Celestia dream sequence, and one that I consider masterfully done. But it's very different from what Device Heretic offers in "Eternal", where large stretches of the story involve Twilight running around inside Celestia's head (and earlier on, Luna running around inside Twilight's). And they both seem different from what I tried to do in my own recent writing.
When I sat down to write Chapter 2 of "Bell, Book & Candle", I decided to lead it off with a dream sequence. I wanted to give the reader some more insight into the pre-classical era and Bellbray's role as a student of Star Swirl the Bearded. In my mind, I expected this to be one of the more compelling parts of the chapter. Then I gave the whole thing to my pre-readers who, as pre-readers are wont to do, completely upended my expectations. They found sequence, as originally written, slow and somewhat boring.
For a little while, I toyed with the idea of dropping the dream entirely. Eventually, I decided it needed to be in there. The background information was important, and it emphasized the theme of prejudice I wanted to bring out with that chapter. But that left the question – how could I jazz up the dream to make it more compelling to my readers?
The dream sequence from Chapter 3 of "Composure" is, hands down, my favorite part of the first three chapters. It rolls and flows, like a stream meandering down a hill. It tells a story of mortality, and community, and Celestia's fear of her own weaknesses. There are some moments of great imagery – a pegasus plucking a star from the sky and planting it in the ground, and a tree of light growing from that place – but the dream always feels like it keeps a coherent narrative. It's a story in its own right, just set in a world with different rules. One of the other things Varanus does is to pluck out concrete referents. Halfway through the dream, a lavender unicorn appears. She agrees to help Celestia fight back a wall of brambles, and runs off to find five other ponies to help. Everything is told in sketches, using only the external appearance of the ponies and their actions to describe them. And paradoxically, I find that this lack of referents enhances their characterization. It strips away the labels and the history to get at an essential character, especially with the lavender unicorn. We see less, but we see more clearly.
"Eternal", on the other hand, is chalk full of dream sequences of a very different character. Disjointed and haphazard. Chaotic. They still have a natural structure to them, but the dreams in Device Heretic's story don't follow the type of smooth progression Varanus uses. For all that a good third of the story involves Twilight delving through Celestia's mind, I feel like this is highlighted best by the shorter journey Luna takes through Twilight's own thoughts and feelings. Twilight's dream is, at first, a simple thing. She and Celestia sit in a garden, sharing tea. But it's like looking at a three dimensional optical illusion. The angles come together in the wrong way. There's a fundamental sense of wrongness. And as you move around the object, you start to perceive it from new directions. You start to understand how the game is played. Twilight isn't drinking tea, she's hiding in the bushes directing the actions of soulless automotons. Twilight isn't anywhere near the garden, she's huddled in shadow playing with puppets. And then, of course, the dream tries to kill Luna – because what dream would be complete without an insane, hyper-powerful mage trying to kill an immortal alicorn princess with her mind? (Answer: any of them not written by Device Heretic)
And that brings me back to "Bell, Book & Candle". Not that I want to pretend that my dream sequence is on the same level as what "Composure" and "Eternal" have to offer. Mine plays a much smaller and less important role, and it neither wants nor needs the sweeping mental vistas those two stories put on display. But it also seems to tackle things in yet another way – more like "Eternal", but still distinct.
In my first pass writing the scene, I left it intentionally hazy and unformed, an unsuccessful attempt to get at what Varanus does by stripping out concrete referents. Unfortunately, all this did was turn the thing into a bit of a shapless, unevocative mess. So when I came back to it, I tried to swing in precisely the opposite direction. Let the dream be alive, imbue it with native form and emotion. Instead of the hazy recollection of dreams, I shot for the manic illogic of their structure – scenes transitioning with immediacy but not always with purpose, personas and events fitting together along ugly, seamless lines that feel natural to the dreamer even while they're utterly alien. As I said, the dream plays a small role in my chapter, so there's only a little of this on display, but it feels like an approach unto itself.
So three stories, three approaches. Varanus gives us flowing, idyllic mystery by creating a dream logic and stripping out our natural referents. Device Heretic gives us a puzzle to be twisted about and viewed from different angles. And my attempt to turn the dream into a character, letting it infect the narrative with its own form and emotion. All three seem like interesting approaches to me, and I'm curious about when I'll have the next chance to write a dream sequence and perhaps play around in this sandbox. "The Account of the Explorer, Waning Promise" will probably give some good opportunity for that, since there's a certain commonality between dreams and madness. I'm looking forward to it.
We only do this to you because we love you. It's all for the best. Honest.
My own take on dreams[1] is to heighten the uncanny sensation of being in a dream by the unconventional use of language. Repetition, strange sentence structure, the occasional bizarre image or simile thrown in to spice it up, and scene transitions that are emphatically not random, but don't use conventional logic, either.
[1] Which I'm yet to use, you understand, but what sort of a writer would I be if I hadn't at least thought about it.
I've never really thought about dream sequences before. I suppose the puzzling angle type dream seems the most interesting to me.
The thing is, dreams, in general, don't keep a coherent narrative.
914871
This is a point that's always interested me. Because (at least in my experience) when you try to reconstruct them, yes, the narrative is completely incoherent. But at the same time, in the moment that you wake up and remember what you were dreaming, it all feels completely coherent. It's just that once you stop and think, nothing joins together correctly.
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ETA: I think the way I originally described that joining, in reference to how things feel in "Eternal", was like you're looking at a mass of ugly, seamless corners. That bit got lost in the rewrite, but I do like the description.
Another thing about your typical dream sequence is that they often don't advance the plot much, which makes them risky no matter how vivid or well done they are. If you've got your reader's attention (and if you don't, you have bigger problems) then what they will be constantly asking is "and then what happens?" Sometimes they get rather impatient about it.
Now, you can't always keep answering that question. Sometimes you have to stop and give the reader some characterisation or exposition. It's kind of like feeding them their vegetables. They want to eat nice, sweet plot-advancement-cake all the time, but you have to trick them into eating the exposition-broccoli first (of course, sometimes they surprise you by saying that they actually quite liked the taste of your broccoli and want more of it).
Dream sequences risk stalling the plot. You know the character is just going to wake up and everything is fine, so what was the point? Doubly so if the character just fainted in the middle of a section of plot advancement having just learned a huge truth.
The dream sequences in Eternal advance the plot. Something is wrong with Twilight, and Luna is there to fix it. Happy that occurrences are occurring, the reader can sit back and enjoy the striking imagery. However, chapter 3 of Composure doesn't fit this theory at all. The only reason it works is that I think Varanus is a wizard.
916883
It's true. I am, in fact, a wizard.
916883>>917815
I can confirm this through personal experience. Wizard.
I've always been fascinated by dream sequences in fiction. Then again, I also suffer constant bad dreams, and they DO join smoothly at the corners. Ever spent four days and three nights walking at the side of some nameless highway, bored out of your skull and thinking that you're dead because you're not getting hungry or tired? I have! That's an actual dream I had once. The scenery was beautiful, the weather was beautiful, nothing bad happened, and yet because it took so very long, it was one of the most traumatic dreams ever. Spending four subjective days in a dream sequence permanently damaged my sense of reality.
If a dream can last four days and seem perfectly real the entire time, what's the limit? How do I really know that I'm not dreaming right now? How can I be sure that yesterday happened and wasn't just a vivid dream? I've woken up to learn that it didn't, before.
Notwithstanding such aberrations as the above, my dreams work by a combination of Kobayashi Maru and Narrative Causality. Manipulating narrative causality is fun and interesting. Manipulating unwinnable scenarios is hard and horrible. I keep my sanity against nightly torment by aggressive cheating. Dreams don't quite grasp real solutions to problems. I have to drill myself on not only what the solution is, but why it's a solution. If I'm pulling a gun on a nightmare, I had better be able to calculate the ballistic trajectory involved, or the weapon won't fire. The only physics that function while dreaming are the physics enforced by the dreamer. It takes a lot of lucidity to make effective use of weaponry.
Cheating is easier. If I'm being chased through a fractal dungeon by an implacable horror, fighting the horror is pointless, but fighting the dungeon works. Grab the metaphorical object of the path and shove it somewhere inaccessible. This just requires that you realize 'the path' is one of the objects from which the dream is constructed. By my experience, most nightmares will try to grab the object and fight for control over it, but at that point you've broken the narrative rules that they're using to make the encounter unwinnable. Most of them get laughably incompetent when you level the playing field.
I talk about nightmares as if they were entities, and dreams as if I weren't alone in them... Well, that is how it often feels. I don't believe it's more than a feeling, but you know what's interesting? Sometimes I'm the one running the unwinnable scenario.
I was a bit dissapointed you weren't critiical of Eternal at all. It's impossible to find a place to criticize it, and by the end it felt very silly for me to say that... it needed less dream sequences, when that was the meat of the fic.
1073509 Oh, I usually have plenty of criticism for Eternal. I really enjoyed it, but it rambled a lot more than it needed to. That said, at least personally, the structure of the dream sequences was something I found entertaining and it's not something I'd really earmark for criticism myself. My issues were primarily with prose and pacing.
But that's me. If you want to criticise Eternal, I say have at it! It could be a fun conversation.