Ooh, this question is right up my alley. I'm going to have a lot to say here.
The short answer is yes.
Please, spare no detail. (Because I also love to hear about people's dreams!).
Well, if you
insist...
Dreaming is one of my favorite activities or experiences, something I'm deeply fascinated by. I'm still holding out hope I'll be an oneirologist when I grow up. I'm also engaging more with daydreaming these days, which is something I did a lot when younger but that I haven't created much space for in the past few years. Often enough I'll dip over into hypnagogia and surf that space for as long as I can.
I'm lucky enough that a majority of my dreams—of the percentage I recall, anyway—manifest as exciting and vivid adventures. Many of them present stable, marvelous worlds with a high degree of consistency and continuity, in which I might spend subjectively long periods of time. Some of these places are repeat destinations that feel strangely like home, inhabited by recurring and altogether familiar characters. They're often tied to particular themes and ongoing storylines. They can be highly inspiring, and though I rarely base whole stories on these I'll often grab a few elements as I exit through the gift shop.
One example—a pretty humdrum one—is a dream I once had about a doctor in a huge city, who would sneak around in a ghetto where “contagious mutants” hide out. He provides free medical aid for them under the nose of the dystopian government he works for. I based a Sci-Fi novel on this, wrote quite a lot of stuff and got some solid world building done but ultimately abandoned the project. I've since lost that material, but the important bits are still fresh in mind, so maybe one day.
Another example is an extended Space Opera type thing. It followed the crew of a spaceship, who dabbled in bounty hunting and xenoarchaeology and much else. I still vividly recall soaring over a futuristic city, and delving deep into the guts of an alien megastructure. Never based a story on this directly, but the vibe and aesthetics of it inspired the Yggdrasilium series, and the warlock-scientist Tormaggon from those books is loosely based on the captain of that spaceship.
I've had a handful of lucid or semi-lucid dreams, always spontaneously, haven't managed to induce any yet. Amazing experiences, but not really the place to find story fodder. One gave me the idea for a short titled “The Sunmaker”, but I'm not sure the premise is strong or interesting enough that I'll ever bother writing it.
And now we come to what I've been dying to talk about: what I like to call “writing dreams”. These come in different forms—it can be as mundane as me dreaming I'm sitting and typing on my little laptop—but often they'll start in a library. I'll pick up a book, which will then unfold into a multi-dimensional story object. A lot of things seem to happen simultaneously: I'm writing the book and reading it with fresh eyes, living the story from each character's perspective, all while watching the complexities of plot and concepts and everything down to the smallest throwaway word manifest as a branching, infinitely mutable puzzle. Often this'll be accompanied by interior monologue where I instruct myself on radically advanced storytelling techniques, explaining in granular detail why something was done a certain way and how it influences everything else. It's bafflingly complex and yet so utterly obvious. There's a sense in these dreams of vastly expanded consciousness, and a feeling of timelessness.
Don't ask me to repeat these Secret Methods, I just don't remember. Well, I recall inventing a philosophy of story that I coined “plotpourri”, but hell if I can explain it. Something about “the escalation vectors of layered, reciprocal plots and the benefits of thematic whiplash in maintained momentum”, whatever the hell that might mean. It seemed to be a way of injecting vitality into every single word, making an irresistible breadcrumb trail leading to a plot event with the attractive force of a black hole. An angelic figure in golden armor figured in the example the dream used to show me how it worked. It really was breathtakingly elegant, or seemed to be anyway.
I'm not convinced there's any profound insight present in these dreams, that's just the perception I have during. The example above, the “plotpourri” thing, dealt with the novel I was working on at the time, where I really struggled to progress. It's as if my subconscious—or superconscious—mind got fed up with my procrastinating, and said, “Fine, I'll do it myself. See, it's
that easy, now get to work you lazy bastard”.
Spoiler alert: I never did master the Plotpourri Technique and still suck at plotting. That novel remains unwritten.
Another writing dream features a certain book (actually a series of books, I think, it's very long and epic anyway) that as far as I know doesn't exist anywhere, I certainly never wrote it in waking life; but it's one I know intimately and I must have had at least three dreams about it. It's brilliant, a masterpiece, radically inventive and downright audacious in how it's done. I suspect the Plotpourri Technique was used.
And what can I tell you about this wonderful book? Dark. That one word, “dark”. I don't know if “dark” is somewhere in the title or if that refers to the color of the cover, or what. Dream logic, eh?
I find these dreams incredibly inspiring, in the sense that they invite me to engage with stories in deeper and more expansive ways. They absolutely fuel my love of storytelling, with their tantalizing glimpses of what might be possible with enough skill and focus.
), a way to get home, avoiding getting involved in crime/violence that I am observing, that kind of thing. Always a relief when I remember that I can fly and yeet myself outta those situations.
