Dream sequences & symbolism · 3:31am Jun 3rd, 2017
Dream sequences are hard.
In the past 2 days, I heard 2 different dream sequences in 2 different stories. One struck me as very effective, and the other did not.
The one that did not was from Gwyneth Jones' short SF story "Balinese Dancer", from Gardner Dozois' "Years Best SF: Fifteenth Annual Collection" (1997 stories).
He [Spence] dreamed that he was clinging to the side of a runaway train that was racing downhill in the dark. Anna was in his arms, and Jake held between them. He knew that he had to leap from this train before it smashed, holding on to them both. But he was too terrified to let go.
There's a little confusion there, re. who's holding whom and what he has to let go of, but the symbolism is clear: a runaway train racing downhill in the dark which they're on and need to take decisive action to get off.
Too clear, I think. When you write a symbolic dream sequence--especially a very short one--you're bracketing it off as explicitly and purely symbolic. This is inherently boring.
In an allegory, like the novel Hinds' Feet on High Places, you have a surface story and a "deeper" meaning. Allegories are still boring, because the surface meaning is unconvincing and predictable, and the deeper meaning is undramatic and preachy, but the reader can suspend disbelief a little and worry, maybe, over whether Pride will talk Much-Afraid out of trying to reach the High Places (spoiler: no). The narrative at least exists.
But a symbolic dream sequence is just an allegory with no suspension of disbelief for the surface narrative. We don't believe Spence is on a runaway train. We don't care if the train crashes.
In the dream above, Spence is thinking that they have to leave the campground they're in, where the locals apparently murdered some people and may soon murder them too. So the dream is a convoluted way of saying,
They had to leave the campground.
Does the dream add anything to that? Does it need a more dramatic presentation? Should it have been described in technicolor smell-o-vision across several paragraphs?
God, no. I would've thrown the book across the room then (except it was an audio CD and already across the room from me).
A similar symbolic sequence, from a famous SF story, Pat Murphy's "Rachel in Love", in Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (and many other anthologies):
In the dream, she has long blonde hair and pale white skin. Her eyes are red from crying and she wanders the house restlessly, searching for something that she has lost. When she hears coyotes howling, she looks through a window at the darkness outside. The face that looks in at her has jug-handled ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in.
Rachel is a very intelligent chimpanzee, the only one in the world. She was raised by a human and wants to be a human. She is in waking life lost or wandering, searching, perhaps, for her place in the world. When Rachel sees herself, and lets herself in, this seems to be her acceptance of herself as a chimpanzee.
I like this dream better, perhaps because it presents a bit of a puzzle yet can be solved, perhaps because it introduces some new information. But we see both horns of a dilemma in this example: The reader already knows that Rachel is searching for her place in the world. The reader doesn't yet know if Rachel will accept that she is a chimpanzee--and may never figure it out, since this is the only indication of it in the story! A statement made in symbols either repeats something made more clearly elsewhere, and thus is redundant, or else is never stated clearly, and so relying on it risks ruining the story for many readers.
(A statement made in symbols within the story rather than within a dream can serve other functions at the same time, such as foreshadowing, indicating mood, or defining character. That's less common and more difficult to do within dreams.)
A better dream sequence (IMHO) from the same story:
In the dream, her father comes to her. "Rachel," he says to her, "it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of you. You're my daughter."
I want to be a real girl, she signs.
"You are real," her father says. "And you don't need some two bit drunken janitor to prove it to you." She knows she is dreaming, but she also knows that her father speaks the truth. She is warm and happy and she doesn't need Jake at all.
Why do I like this better? I think because it's just a continuation of the story within a dream. It has the same characters and location as Rachel's waking world, and deals directly with matters from that world. It advances the story without confusing us. It happens in a dream only so that Rachel can speak with a dead man, and so that he will speak directly to her worries.
Here's an irritating dream sequence from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment:
In his illness he had dreamt that the entire world had fallen victim to some strange, unheard of and unprecedented plague that was spreading from the depths of Asia into Europe. Everyone was to perish, apart from a chosen few, a very few. Some new kind of trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in people's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, gifted with will and intelligence. People who absorbed them into their systems instantly became rabid and insane. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and in unswerving possession of the truth as did those who became infected. Never had they believed so unswervingly in the correctness of their judgements, their scientific deductions, their moral convictions and beliefs. Entire centres of population, entire cities and peoples became smitten and went mad. All were in a state of anxiety and no one could understand anyone else, each person thought that he alone possessed the truth and suffered agony as he looked at the others, beating his breast, weeping and wringing his hands. No one knew who to make the subject of judgement, or how to go about it, no one could agree about what should be considered evil and what good. No one knew who to blame or who to acquit. People killed one another in a kind of senseless anger. Whole armies were ranged against one another, but no sooner had these armies been mobilized than they suddenly began to tear themselves to pieces, their ranks falling apart and their soldiers hurling themselves at one another, gashing and stabbing, biting and eating one another. [... long rant cut ...] Everyone and everything perished. The plague grew worse, spreading further and further. Only a few people in the whole world managed to escape: they were the pure and chosen, who had been predestined to begin a new species of mankind and usher in a new life, to renew the earth and render it pure, but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words and voices.
Partly this irritates me because of its subject matter [1]. But mostly it irritates me because it is, again, a transparent allegory--and, again, as it is staged within a dream, the surface narrative (the plague, the wars) provides no drama, suspense, or human interest. [2]
Here's a dream sequence I read two days ago, from Alexander McCall Smith's The Full Cupboard of Life [3]. Mma Potokwane runs an orphanage. Over the courseof five books, she has repeatedly pressured Mr J.L.B. Matekoni into doing things he didn't want to do. Now she has manipulated him into "volunteering" to do a parachute jump to raise money for the orphanage.
A door of the plane was opened, and he was beckoned within by the pilot, who, as it happened, was Mma Potokwane herself.
“Get in, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni,” shouted Mma Potokwane above the noise of the engine. She seemed vaguely annoyed that he was holding things up in some way, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni obeyed, as he always did.
Mma Potokwane seemed quite confident, leaning forward to flick switches and adjust instruments. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni reached to touch a switch that appeared to need attention, as an orange light was flashing behind it, but his hand was brushed away by Mma Potokwane. “Don’t touch!” she shouted, as if addressing an orphan. “Dangerous!”
He sat back, and the little plane shot forward down the runway. The trees were so close, he thought, the grass so soft that he could jump out now, roll over, and escape; but there was no getting away from Mma Potokwane, who looked at him crossly and shook a finger in admonition. And then they were airborne, and he looked out of the window of the plane at the land below him, which was growing smaller and smaller, a miniaturised Botswana of cattle like ants and roads like thin strips of twisting brown thread. Oh, it was so beautiful to look down on his land and see the clouds and the blue and all the air. One might so easily step out onto such clouds and drift away, off to the West, over the great brown, and alight somewhere where the lions walked and where there were springs of water and tall trees and little sign of man.
Mma Potokwane pulled on the controls of the plane and they circled, hugging the edge of the town so far below. He looked down and he saw Zebra Drive; it was so easy to spot it, and was that not Mma Ramotswe waving to him from her yard, and Mma Makutsi, in her new green shoes? They were waving, smiling up at him, pointing to a place on the ground where he might land. He turned to Mma Potokwane, who smiled at him now and pointed to the handle of the door.
He reached out and no more than touched the door before it flew open. He felt the wind on his face, and the panic rose in him, and he tried to stop himself falling, holding onto one of the levers in the plane, a little thing that gave him no purchase. Mma Potokwane was shouting at him, taking her hands off the controls of the plane to shove him out, and now kicked him firmly in the back with those flat brown shoes which she wore to walk about the orphan farm. “Out!” she cried, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, mute with fear, slipped out into the empty air and tumbled, head over heels, now looking at the sky, now at the ground, down to the earth that was still so far away beneath him.
There was no parachute, of course, just pyjamas, and they were billowing about him, hardly slowing him up at all. This is how it ends, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and he began to think of how good life had been, and how precious; but he could not think of these things for long, for his fall was over in seconds and he landed on his feet, perfectly, as if he might have hopped off an old orange box at the garage; and there he was, out in the bush, beside a termite mound. He looked about him; it was an unfamiliar landscape, perhaps Tlokweng, perhaps not, and he was studying it when he heard his father’s voice behind him. He turned round, but there was no sign of his father, who was there but not quite there, in the way in which the dead can come to us in our dreams. There was much that he wanted to ask his father, there was much that he wanted to tell him about the garage, but his father spoke first, in a voice which was strange and reedy—for a dead man has no breath to make a voice—and asked a question which woke up Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, wrenching him from his dream with its satisfactory soft landing by the termite mound.
“When are you going to marry Mma Ramotswe?” asked his father. “Isn’t it about time?”
I love this dream sequence. I laughed all the way through it (though I suppose you'd have to read the books to understand why).
What is the primary difference between the dream sequences I liked, and the dream sequences I didn't like?
I think the difference is that the dream sequences I didn't like did what people expect dream sequences to do: re-present something happening in the story in an allegorical (= systematically symbolic) manner. The dream sequences I liked did not do that. They used very little symbolism. Rachel letting herself in might symbolize accepting herself, but that's the only instance I found.
I believe that real dreams are often symbolic. I find them very interesting because they are symbolic. But that doesn't make them good fiction, any more than writing a dream sequence that was as incoherent and fragmentary as a real dream would make good fiction.
A good scene, paragraph, sentence, or word must tell us something new. A symbolic dream can do that, but it is inherently difficult, because it must use many words to set up the symbolism. I would guess it works well only when (like the Dostoyevsky dream in footnote [2]) the dream is long enough that the setup is a small part of it, that we can attain some suspension of disbelief, and that most of it is an entirely new story which, when decoded, reveals something new about the waking story world. Perhaps it also works if you go in the other direction, making it so short that it's more description than allegory: "Spence drempt of rushing down a mountainside in a car with no brakes."
But a symbolic recoding of something we already know isn't as dramatic on the page as it is in real life. In real life, a dream makes us stop and consciously think about the dream's subject as part of a narrative. When we're reading a novel, we're already analyzing it as a narrative. We don't need a special invitation to do it again.
The two dream sequences that I liked did not construct any allegories. The first used a dream to have a dead character give Rachel an epiphany. The second played out how Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's imagined the parachute jump, and the information it added was mostly little bits of what actors might call "business", filling in the gaps between the "plot points", like
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni obeyed, as he always did
“Don’t touch!” she shouted, as if addressing an orphan. “Dangerous!”
there was no getting away from Mma Potokwane, who looked at him crossly and shook a finger in admonition.
Mma Potokwane was shouting at him, taking her hands off the controls of the plane to shove him out, and now kicked him firmly in the back with those flat brown shoes which she wore to walk about the orphan farm. “Out!” she cried, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, mute with fear, slipped out into the empty air and tumbled
This dream isn't telling us about the events in it; it's showing us how Mr. Matekoni feels about them, and about how Mma Potokwane treats him. The final line is, just like the previous dream, a dead father providing an epiphany (or perhaps a guilt trip)
So, don't assume that story dreams must be like real dreams, any more than story plots should be like real life. Story dreams should keep the story moving. Confusing allegorical recaps don't.
[1] Dostoyevsky was prescient in seeing the danger of rationalist, utopian revolutions, but he went to the opposite extreme and rejected rationality entirely, writing an entire book (Notes from Underground) on the theme that 2 + 2 = 5 is a more beautiful belief than that 2 + 2 = 4.
[2] There are a lot of dream sequences in Crime and Punishment. The most-famous is the first, in which Mikolka kills a horse. It has a standard interpretation that's in the Cliffs Notes and on the Wikipedia page, etc.: Rodion (the protagonist and dreamer, and the boy in the dream) is contemplating murdering an old woman. The dream, they say, shows himself as the boy resisting himself as Mikolka.
However, this interpretation has two big problems. One is that when Mikolka says "She's mine!" in the dream, he's referring to a hobbyhorse of Dostoyevsky's--the immorality of monetization of relationships--which is not even presented in Crime and Punishment AFAIK; I think it's in Notes from Underground. Crime and Punishment, to the contrary, contains many scenes of people using money to do good, so this seems like something Dostoyevsky dropped into the scene because it was on his mind, but that really should have gone into another novel.
The other is that the horse is later explicitly linked not to either of the women Rodion kills, but to Katerina Ivanovna. The only occurrences of the word "jade" (apparently slang for an old horse) are in the dream, and at Katerina Ivanovna's death. From the dream:
It was a strange thing, however, that in the present instance one of these massive carts had been harnessed up to a small, thin, greyish peasant jade, one of the kind which – he had often seen this – sometimes overstrain themselves when hauling a tall load of hay or firewood, particularly if the cart gets bogged down in the mire or in a rut, and which the muzhiks always beat so viciously….
She sank right back on to her hindquarters, but then leapt up again and started tugging, tugging with all the strength she had left in various directions, in order to get going with her load; but whichever way she moved she was greeted by six knouts, and the cart-shaft rose and fell a third time, and then a fourth, in measured rhythm, with all its wielder's might. Mikolka was in a frenzy of rage because he was unable to kill her with one blow….
The blow thudded down; the little mare began to totter, sank down, tried to give another tug, but the crowbar again came down on her back, and she fell to the ground, as if all her four legs had been cut away from under her at once. … The jade stretched her muzzle forwards, uttered a heavy sigh, and died.
From the scene where Katerina dies:
She was in a state of extreme agitation and was making efforts to get up. At last, in a hoarse, terrible, overstrained voice she began to recite, screaming and gasping at every word, with an air of obscurely mounting terror:
"In heat of noon!… in Dagestan's!… deep valley!…"
‘Your Excellency!’ she suddenly cried in a heart-rending wail, and dissolving in tears, ‘protect these orphans! Since you've known the hospitality of the deceased Semyon Zakharych!… who was even almost an aristocrat!… Gh-ha!’ she gasped, shuddering, suddenly regaining consciousness and gazing round at everyone with a kind of horror, but then recognizing Sonya. ’Sonya, Sonya!’ she said meekly and affectionately, as though surprised at seeing her in front of her. ‘Sonya, dearest, are you here, too?’
Once more they helped her to sit up.
‘Enough!… It's time!… Farewell, my poor creature!… They've driven the jade to death!… I've overstrai-i-ned myself!’ she cried, despairingly and full of hatred, and collapsed on the pillow with a thud.
Again she lost consciousness, but this final oblivion did not last long. Her withered, pale-yellow face jerked back, her mouth opened, and her legs stretched out convulsively. She gave a deep, deep sigh and died.
The similarities are too great to ignore, and yet I can make no sense out of putting Katerina's death into the horse dream. It would be a neat link if Rodion's murders led to Katerina's death, but I cannot find any such link in the story. I did not use this dream as one of my examples because, despite its fame, I don't know whether it's a good example or a bad example.
[3] I recommend studying the sentences in his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books. Every sentence Smith writes both does its own job, and directs the reader towards the next sentence, so the stories are compact yet read smoothly.
I'm surprised at how many of these dreams are explicitly portrayed as dreams, even to the point that the characters experiencing them describe them as dreams while they are seemingly occurring. When I dream I rarely understand that I am dreaming; when I write characters who dream, I always portray them as not understanding that they are dreaming. That seems the only honest way to write dreams to me.
4556597
Seconded. I don't have characters realize it's a dream until they wake up...or Luna tells them they're dreaming.
It also strikes me as odd how logical and sensible dreams are written most of the time. I take a dream sequence as an opportunity to practice my stream of consciousness skill and let my surrealist flag fly.
And I also like most of the dream symbolism to be actual dream symbolism. And also flower language symbolism because it's my story and nobody can stop me so here's some darnell grass because it means vice
4556597 4556627 Can you copy-paste an example of how you transition into a dream?
Yes. for me, writing a dream sequence should have the dreaming character fully buying into it as real, even believing wholeheartedly in its absurdities. It's rare for a dream to be anything but that for me. I'd likely be put off by the author immediately announcing that it was a dream.
Echoing Cold in Gardez and PatchworkPoltergeist, I think the explicit mentioning of dreaming isn't nearly as common with fanfics (at least, I don't recall any off the top of my head). Do you think that affects the effectiveness of a dream sequence?
I don't think I've ever been especially bothered by an "in the moment" dream sequence, for example. Perhaps such sequences are more likely to be of the type that push the story forward?
4556629
I did it with a normal scene transition after the character goes to bed, but the real signal that it's dream time is using present tense. Unless I have a solid reason not to, I always do dreams in present tense, since that's how dreams feel.
Likewise, when Luna arrives (a big clue for Silver Spoon that she's dreaming) and the nightmare settles down, the tense switches back to past tense in mid-sentence:
4556627
This is pretty YMMV. My dreams (the ones I remember) are usually a pretty sensible progression of events[1], even if there might be one or two "off" things or a weird transition that I only notice thinking back on it. When people try to get too surreal with dreams, I tend to roll my eyes.
[1] Almost always based around finding interesting shops or collections of vendors, for some reason, though one time I was shopping for a house. When I wake up I'm always disappointed that the places don't actually exist.
I have to think for a minute to come up with any dream sequence I've written more than a line or two. One of my first stories, To Sleep, Perchance To Dream has a somewhat longer one tied into the plot of Luna having 'issues' with her return, but just about all the ones I've done since are all for the laughs. (I've had Luna/Celestia tag team both Green Grass and Pops)
I'm in favor of actually telling the reader that the character is dreaming *because* otherwise readers can get very easily confused.
Huh, I never knew that was the standard interpretation to the horse dream in Crime and Punishment. I always interpreted it as the protagonist associating his life to that of the horse in the dream: An overachiever that gets beaten down by the world. The boy cries for mercy for the poor horse (himself), which reinforced the mindset of him in the presence to change his destiny which, compared to his twisted view of how he is treated, isn't particularly horrific. There might be a tie to Christ's suffering in the dream too, which would reinforce Raskolnikov's arrogance – he sees himself as implicitly above other men. This means that the ties with Katherina death should be interpreted as her asking for mercy for his crime. A similar interpretation, of Raskolnikov putting himself as one of the chosen few who are immune to the madness of the world, would fit the dream about the plague.
Honestly, I'm a little tired of symbolic/foreshadowing dreams. If you're writing a fantasy story where the gods send people prophetic dreams, fair enough, but for the rest of us, dreams are usually just bits and stitches of memories and ideas. There might be common themes (for example, a lot of my dreams take place in hotels or shopping malls--big, maze-like, crowded spaces) or even a re-evaluation of previous experiences (I swear I dreamed that I was re-living a day in first grade once), but I'm pretty sure most people don't have dreams like that example with the train. At most, I can understand, say, PTSD flashbacks, but even then I think it should be fragmented and indistinct, rather than vivid, lifelike experiences.
In a recent story, I described it like this (though the reason the dream was murky was also because Luna hadn't created dreams yet, but it's the same principle):
4556629
I don't think I've ever transitioned into a dream sequence using anything other than a hard scene break. Sometimes I start a dream sequence in what appears to be normal reality, to emphasize how real the dream itself feels.
I use dreams as a plot device probably more than I should – they can be a bit of a crutch. But in a setting where dreams have as much relevance as FiM, and one of the primary characters (and the original antagonist) is based around the power of dreams, it's an easy crutch to lean on.
I typically attack dreams in one of two ways – a more straightforward description of the weirdness of dreams, acknowledging that it is a dream, but emphasizing just how surreal they are. I usually do this for situations where the character is in that liminal state between sleeping and waking. The second, more immersive style, simply plays the dream straight as part of the narrative. Sometimes the character realizes they're dreaming, but even so the narrative proceeds as if everything is normal.
First style, from Small Town Charm:
And the second style, from A Once and Future Darkness:
That horse dream from Crime and Punishment simply underlines something that ought to be said about MLP fanfiction in particular - the show operates on dream logic. It's full of ponies operating on the assumption that all the magical, miraculous nonsensical wonders around them are rational, logical, coherent. Their world responds to their expectations. It is mutable, highly contingent, responsive. For pegasi and griffons, life's is a flying dream. And so on.
images-ext-2.discordapp.net/.eJxdxzFuwzAMAMC_GOgYy_WSJmtRdE1fQNASLRGRRFaUEThB_57MXQ64x7C1PJyH1LuenROeR03SZdn8lfropTjMy1bM7e9H95mo7O4idX-bJ6zh5dfPtzt9nKZpBjBcCRpyXeQW0BIo1yuTMgFWLtgpAP1uZL0xRm7ZwHwjqh4VAjUFU-FM7eAlSz2sjakGS6wRCxn8_10txiUWWf0YeR3-nhKaTXU.iaAV3BNptgIcu2lOZUTaURr0Nds
4556699
This. I've lately grown tired of the helpfully symbolic dream in narratives. I figure to myself that everyone dreams differently (discussions of whether or not you see color speak to this), so I try not to get too mad about it, but rarely do I see fic authors, at least, who use dreams well, as something other than a means to insert exposition the protagonist would otherwise have no means to access.
And they're always so straightforward! My dreams slide back and forth against each other, rarely ever finishing, even if they have a strong narrative thread. Dream imagery is a lost art. :C
the most interesting use of dream sequences I can remember is from Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. the main character is already prone to fantasizing and daydreaming during social situations, and it's obvious what they mean because he's consciously imagining them. He wants X, or fears Y, etc. These and flashbacks bleed together with the actual events, but that makes the actual dream sequences sneaky because it's not immediately clear when they begin.... but it's much more jarring when they abruptly end.
So (to me at least) it's one of the few examples of dreams that felt convincing. After the character wakes up, it's disorienting as he slowly becomes of aware of his surroundings. And much like how you don't analyze a dream's meaning until after it's over, it's at this point that I realize the previous nonsensical sequence was deeper than I assumed, it's not like his whimsical daydreams which can be taken at face value. However, the dream's symbols aren't obvious allegories, they're recurring motifs across the larger story. An example is the dream of a tiny
ponyhorse that fits in his hand, which is paralleled later by a different character making a small lead figurine of a horse. Some may prefer that dreams be easier to immediately psychoanalyze, but I think this method worked better in this story -- a mystery that leads nowhere for the main character, but we the audience can connect the dots (like the unicorn in Blade Runner, I guess?)4556776
I like dream sequences when they reveal something important to the story about a character's psychology. Preferably something that isn't entirely straightforward, but sometimes straightforward is okay: most of the dream sequences from FiM fall into that category, and I think they're fine.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the trope, just the way it's misused. Those horrific examples above aren't just bad because they're not doing dream sequences 'properly', they're bad because they're super-duper-telly. If the dream is important, don't say, "they had a dream"; show us the bucking dream. Do you know what the most boring thing in the world is? Listening to somepony tell you about the dream they had. Unless freaky sex was involved and that's the only thing they're talking about, it's just awful.
And don't tell us it's a dream until the character knows it, because we generally want to experience what the character experiences. The only exception I can think of would be for first-pony narration of events, where prefacing a disturbing dream to the reader makes sense in the larger context of dialogue (I've done this more than once).
4556597
With respect, CiG, this is enormously variable. There are plenty of people who lucidly dream on an entirely regular basis without meaning or wanting to. There are also plenty of people who never remember their dreams at all. The fact that you personally don't do either of those things doesn't mean they're not real and part of the experiences of a lot of folks.
Writing characters who are aware they're dreaming is equally as honest as the other way around.
4556948
You know, this is a truism... but I can't help wonder if its true simply because most people are crap at storytelling in general. No judgment. People are crap at most things they lack training, aptitude, and experience at in general. So yeah, someone telling you about the dream they just had is pretty boring... but someone telling you about most things they just did is pretty boring, isn't it?
Anyway.
It seems to me that a lot of the time, writers reach for a dream sequence when they might be better served by a straight-up hallucination or vision sequence. But the latter has a lot of baggage attached to it; we're supposed to have visions when we sleep. This is normal. We're not supposed to have them while we're awake; this is generally not considered to be a good sign.
On the other hand, if you do it while people are awake you can play the "is this just real life, or is it fantasy" game with both the characters and the readers, and that's a fun (and sometimes terrifying) game for all involved.
Dreams are so hard to do in fiction, and they're completely optional, so they're usually not worth doing. The only times I've seen them done well are a few times in Harry Potter ("Harry dreamed his hair was on fire or something, but did not remember it when he woke up") or when a character is woken up unexpectedly and it needs to be clear that his deep seated emotions are still influencing his thinking.
When in doubt, don't do a dream sequence, and if you do, make it fun or absurd like the parachute example.
4557375
It's true because actual dreams are shitty stories and the marvel of them isn't conveyable through narration.
"It was... weird. I was at work, but I was at a new place? And then I was looking for my wallet and went for a drive in deep snow and ended up in like, an alien kitchen, and there was a mystery with playing cards or something, it might have been a magician, but it ended with this video game I was playing, and then taking part in, with an impossibly long moat and my dad was there and—"
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/5/10/622788__safe_twilight+sparkle_animated_princess+twilight_magic_hub+logo_fight_spoiler-colon-s04e26_lord+tirek_beam.gif
4557502
Oh, I agree. I remember writing an important one where Twilight Sparkle is running away from these featureless nightmares, and then she trips and lands on the ground and all of her friends and family are there with these thick, spear-like phallic shadows thrusting out of their bodies and faces and impaling her as they laugh and she gasps for breath amid the painful and unspeakable trauma.
so that one clearly meets the "fun" criterion
4557375
Weighing in on the nature of dreaming itself, I'm almost always aware of the fact that I'm dreaming while they're in progress. I usually can't do much of anything to change what's happening in them, though. Often, it's like I'm watching my dreams happen to me rather than experiencing them first hand. Dreaming in third person, I guess. I'm not sure if that counts as full-on lucid dreaming or what the deal is exactly.
4556597
Normally, I also tend to do the same, although I've made a few exceptions for ponyfic, because Luna.
One thing I like to do to set them off is have the dream in present tense, which typically gives it a disjointed feel from the rest of the story, but it isn't always obvious to the reader why, at least not right away.
4556645
Damn, I thought I was the only one who'd done that.
Although to be fair one of my pre-readers suggested it, and it works perfectly, because it's kind of confusing to the reader but odds are that they don't quite know why--it's like a small, deliberate speed bump in the middle of the text.
4556634
I've had a few dreams where I was aware I was dreaming inside of the dream, but for the most part, I'd agree with you--while in the dream, everything, no matter how odd or illogical seems perfectly valid and believable and it's not until afterwards when I'm awake that I think back on how weird some of it was.
4557375
Yeah, and besides that, I think that a lot of times if the dream affected you on a somewhat emotional level, that's even harder to convey to someone else--I've had some of those, and I kinda wanted to tell someone about them, but at the same time, I didn't exactly want to explain why it had affected me emotionally--like, I didn't want to give the whole backstory--and I think a lot of times that can be a problem.
Man, I'm just thinking of my boss trying to tell a story about a dream. He's so bad at storytelling already; he'll go off on meaningless tangents and never get back to the actual story.
4556948 I usually enjoy listening to people describe their dreams. That's odd, because I hate listening to disjointed stories. Dreams are like surrealist paintings.
I don't tell people my dreams, though, bcoz sometimes while telling a dream, you suddenly realize it has a perfectly obvious interpretation, i.e., you want to bang the person you're telling it to.
Lately I've been having dreams that involve memories of things that never happened.
For example, my brothers and sisters and I are all visiting the house where we grew up. And it's all wrong: the floorplan, the placement of the doors and windows, even the climate (because the windows are all open for some reason)--they're nothing like the house we grew up in. But as we walk through it and they say "This used to be your room!" or "Remember when?" I feel a sense of definite recognition and certitude, just as I would if I'd gone back to the real house.
I suppose it's related to deja vu.
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That's very... interesting. How often do you discover you want to buck somepony while talking to them?
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... about half the time?
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Addendum. I agree that semi-coherent dreams are interesting (especially from a Jungian perspective: see, I can philosopher thing good too), those just aren't the ones you normally hear from somepony who woke up recently.
I used to keep a dream log. It was super-informative, because the whole point is to elucidate the dreams you have into an actual narrative form. It's a good writing exercise that forces you to think in a different way and stretch your memory, and it's the most important element of learning to lucid dream regularly: training yourself to think clearly while in a hypnopompic state.
My old dream log was easy to read. (I'm sure I destroyed it long ago, sadly.) In fact, my dad found the log one day, and was unable not to read some of it when certain words leaped of the page and assaulted his eyes, and he learned... things. Many new wonders, previously unimaginable to him—a surprising amount of education considering he did not get very far at all into the dream journal (for reasons now reminiscent of my readers bailing on specific, horrifying chapters of Twilight's particular journal).
Things were a little awkward for awhile.
4557786 Those aren't dreams; that's just ordinary early-stage Alzheimer's.
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Doesn't run in my family, actually. But who knows, i could always be the special one.
I could have sworn I wrote a dream sequence about Princess Cadance last night, but it appears to have happened in my sleep, and I can no longer remember it.
4567154 Hint: It was clop.
Oh god those spindly leg paintings, I hate those
Anyway, very thought provoking. I've never thought much about dream sequences actually, despite them occurring in some of my favorite stories. I'm not sure I can say why I enjoy them, or if I've ever come across any I don't like. I enjoy them very much in pony fiction, but instinct tells me I wouldn't quite as much in regular (literary) fiction. Perhaps because in real life dreams often mean nothing, and so how convenient for the story the character happens to have a meaningful dream perfectly coinciding with the narrative. So maybe it feels too artificial? I dunno. I don't have that issue in ponyland, nor, probably, in fantasy or scifi. Perhaps if the symbolic or metaphoric weight was already built up enough. So maybe it's suddenly introducing metaphor into a metaphorless story I take issue with.