Brainstorming for Original Fiction · 10:52pm Apr 12th, 2019
Picture the following;
The world we know is actually a dream, and the world of dreams is secretly reality.
In the waking world (i.e. the dream world), everyone has perfect control of their body. You can shapeshift, move at ludicrous speed, transmute your body into other materials. You can even break off a piece of your body and transmute or change that; with enough willpower and practice, you can turn a single piece of yourself into an simulacrum of another person--an autonomous entity. You could forge a building or city of buildings, and populate it with people, but it's all still you.
Everyone who is awake has an area, a domain, where they've made a piece of their body into a city.
Because you have perfect control of your body, you can never die. You can become exhausted, you still need to sleep, but your dreams are of the mundane--the real world you left behind.
If you die in the mundane world, however, you lose the ability to dream. You might still fall asleep on occasion, but it will be restless and brief. And gradually, without the ability to dream, you will experience all the usual symptoms of sleep deprivation: fatigue, confusion, memory loss...on and on, up to hallucinations, mania, and insanity.
This is the setting, the backdrop. What is the conflict?
It sounds like such a world could either be idyllic -- no one needs food, everyone has power to shape the world around them to their whim -- or a tortuous hellscape populated by omnipotent megalomaniacs. I think making that distinction, how people in this world live, is what you need to do next.
A serial killer in the mundane world has to be taken care of without any of the powers that people are used to. No-one is quite sure how to do this properly, given that they rarely lucid dream to the point of no longer dissocating over the slightest thing.
I think it’s the same as any transhuman setting with sufficiently advanced technology. All your material needs are met, so what it really comes down to is what you care about.
You will need to work hard to avoid falling into solipsism. When everything you meet or experience is a part of you, well, why would you ever leave? I’m fact, many people may not even be aware, or have forgotten, that anyone beyond themself even exists.
In this way the dreams of mundane reality are incredibly important, to give everyone at least the experience of a world they don’t control even if they don’t live in it.
Of course, since not many people have much experience with that, the mundane world kind of sucks at times...
So in this case your standard fantasy dream wardens are the people trying to help out in mundane reality.
I can also imagine some of the few people who travel between domains, or the untempered dreamspace beyond being main characters. And even being surprised to learn that there are consistencies in these dreams of a mundane world. Consistent places, events... They may even know each other already!
Meanwhile, imagine someone with an agenda in the real world pursuing it by acting in the mundane one. In reality you may be a god in your own domain, but in your dreams...
I also remember an idea that’s related to taking advantage of the differing worlds. In the story I read someone had been pulled into another reality. It had intense magic, which he knew nothing of. But he could do impossible things like take something that belonged to someone else without permission, or treat them as solid when they didn’t want to be tangible.
1) Mysterious nightmares begin killing people—
1a) —So that an evil organization can take of the world
1b) —Because everyone's perfect control over themselves means that their subconscious is leaking out in murder-y ways.
1c) —Because someone is using the dreaming to take over people's minds and rule the world.
2) Upside down version of the Matrix, where the guy who gets told he's Jesus is crazy, and the agents trying to stop him are good.
3) People stop waking up OR stop going to sleep. Thing about how we need to balance reality and fantasy.
I feel like "The world we know is actually a dream, and the world of dreams is secretly reality" might be unnecessarily complex? Maybe people play in a VR wonderland instead of dreaming, or maybe just connect people's dreams? I'm not sure what flipping reality around adds that the more straightforward versions don't.
You might post this on the Ideas Exchange.
Can you die in the waking world? At all, if you choose to? Dreaming humans inevitably die, and the dead vastly outnumber the living. If no one can die but everyone inevitably loses their ability to dream, it follows that those who can still dream are small islands of sanity in the midst of a rolling sea of mad gods.
5043634
It occurs to me, one of the names for the monsters for a season of Sailor Moon was Remless. Dreamless, in other words.
Someone wants to control dreams, and to do that they hold their mundane selves hostage. Or manipulate them, so that it shows up in the true reality of dreams...
But yeah, there will also be a whole maelstrom of people unable to dream, swirling and fragmenting as their identities and the line between them and their projections break down and merge with each other. Even if they eventually return to the stuff of dream, or settle to become the base components of the broader Dreamland, they’ll still be a problem.
I remember a bit from Lovecraft, where the protagonist realizes the dream of an alien city in the dreamlands is actually based on Boston.
You should probably look into The Dream Quest if Unknown Kadath, look for ideas. But the ‘shared dream’ that is mundane reality informs and inspires the true reality of the dream world. And the fragments and ideas and even people from it spill out, taking independent life, very much like how a supernova produces new elements. Each dreamer is a star, and we are all star stuff.
Since this is still brainstorming, I'm going to spoiler tag some of my own ideas, lest they pollute or preconceive other thoughts.
5043536 My general idea was that people who have awakened generally keep to themselves. After all, if their simulacra are convincing enough, why bother interacting with others? But occasionally--either because of boredom or because of someone newly awakening--someone will invade another's territory. They fight, and whoever becomes too tired to continue will lose control of their domain, leaving it free for the other party to take.
While post-scarcity can be an interesting setting, I like the idea that even in a world like this, humans still find something to fight over.
5043537 I think the problem with a Highlander-esque fight for resources is that it raises too many plot holes and awkward questions. Why can this person evade the mundane authorities? Is there some knowledge or power that they can transfer between the worlds? Why are they bothering to kill people anyway?
Obviously, with more development, all these questions could have answers. And I do think the idea that the mundane world holds some value to the awakened has some merit.
5043546 I imagine it's like a programmer making a program; it can only do what you tell it, can only follow its instructions. But perhaps those instructions create results you didn't intend or interact in strange ways.
Someone reacting badly to death in the waking world is fine, but would death really impact them so much? It's similar to watching a loved one die slowly in more mundane terms, and people adjust to that all the time (with vary stages and intensities of grief, yes, but most still adjust).
5043562 The main difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction is often that technology is understood, whereas magic is not. (Though of course exceptions exist in either direction). If someone doesn't understand their own powers, their own world or their place in it, then that casts the story in a very different tone.
I think the idea that the mundane world has some sort of check or balance on everyone is an important theme this story could explore. Why did this system come to pass? Does everyone dream of mundane life because it teaches them humility or compassion or hardship? Did the functional gods that humans are decide to nerf themselves, or did outside forces cause it? Even if the story doesn't answer these questions, the answers may be important for worldbuilding.
5043622 I don't think 1a, 1c, or 2 really scan well into this world. Why would governments or organizations exist in the waking world? What reason would awakened people have to band together, to form relationships? Do preexisting relationships carry over into the waking world? Do they go the other direction? Of course, perhaps they do, and that is a driving force of the plot. I don't know yet.
For 1b and 3, if you have perfect control of your body, then I imagine it would be a simple matter to tell yourself to dream or wake as you saw fit. Of course, perhaps that's not the case, and this one exception to your abilities drives some conflict.
It is admittedly a complex conceit, but that is why we are brainstorming about it. The surreal nature of dreams and the lack of complete understanding of these powers do cast everything in a different light, compared to fully understood technology. It also came to me in a dream, and I thought that was interesting enough to be worth exploring.
5043634 I think having (near-?)perfect control of your own body means you can't die, unless you allow it. Perhaps the body has subconscious defense mechanisms that also prevent one from dying? How far does this control spread? Can someone with enough practice even remove their need to dream, or is that like a hand trying to perform surgery on itself? Mortality is a big driver of conflict in fiction, and so making characters too powerful--too far beyond mortality--will it make harder to build a good story around them.
My initial idea is that most humans--the ones who never "wake up"--don't have much impact on the waking world. When someone dreams of the waking world, they are confined to their own small space, lashing about subconsciously, barely even contacting with others, if at all. Basically, without practice and training, one's domain is only ever themself. All the imagery of dreams is confined to a small area.
Any awakened with enough experience and practice avoids people who are still not fully awake, rather like one avoids a sleepwalker. And perhaps one who dies in the mundane world without ever waking up enter some sort of coma-analogue. But perhaps these unawakened hold some other danger or conflict. Perhaps interacting with an unawakened is what causes them to wake up in the first place.
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What I keep coming back to is someone trying to take advantage of the situation. Granted, there's a not lot of personal gain to be had in such a world, but "shadowy conspiracy" is stuck in my mind.
I guess, to flip the script, it could be more of a disaster flick? People falling asleep and becoming trapped in the dream world, the power that gives them their abilities breaking down, things like that.
5043726
What happens to crazy people with these powers?
Unless this is a short story, you maybe should think about finding a reason or excuse for more people to be involved because the fact that people don't interact with each other could be what's making it so hard to find a plot.
5043748 I guess that's kind of the problem I keep coming to: when there is no real personal gain to be had, what is driving the conflict? "Turf war" is a fine concept, but it doesn't work as well in such a world. People are generally risk-averse, and so there needs to be some sort of force or pressure driving the conflict. Because of the nature of the setting, most of the easy avenues for conflict aren't there.
5043780 Even in this world, I don't think bringing back the dead is possible. This is definitely personal bias, since I find resurrection to be a pretty lazy storytelling device.
5043788 It only takes two characters interacting to get the plot going. A story like this may have an economy cast, but not all the characters need to be awakened who are going to ignore each other. Perhaps these simulacra are worth exploring as bigger parts of the plot.
5044313
The only other thing I can think is natural disaster. But I would imagine people can prevent those, too.
5044347 I imagined that the waking planet is at worst a barren husk. People have overwritten it so much with their domains, that whenever a domain collapses there's nothing underneath. At best, a domain being removed could reveal a husk of an old city or a bit of greenery underneath. I suppose that might be grounds for an environmental disaster, but what's to prevent someone from merely overwriting it again?
5044478 I think a major theme of this story is how people interact with the transition from one world to the other. While straight-up resurrection doesn't really fit, a replacement goldfish could definitely be a big part of that theme.
5044722
Hmm.
I wonder if you could get any ground out of, say, someone who takes notice of this barren wasteland time and time again and wonders why no one else cares. Why everyone's constantly going from one self-generated simulation to the next, no breaks to stop and ponder the ruins on which those simulations hang.
Could go the villainous route, but I think it'd be more interesting to explore ideas of, like, beyond man vs. nature, man conquered nature and now nature is dead, real world vs. artificial, questions of how far individual choice can be allowed to range. They'd be like, the most epic ecoterrorist ever. :B