The little one’s been sick for the last week so she’s been in our bed. This is distracting and I don’t get the 9 hours (yeah I said 9!) that I like which means on the weekends I sleep in. And therefore I dream more. Each time I wake and go back to sleep I have another dream. I’m a dream factory.
My dreams have always been vivid. In color. Always cinematic in quality.
My recurring nightmare(although I don’t find it scary after 25 years of dreaming it, is an epic zombie war. And I can fly.
Last night I dreamed I found a rare and beautiful creature. Some sort of humanoid squid, but not slimy or tentacular. Obviously a deep sea dweller. A young child-like being but white as bone with long hair that looked like strings of pearls.
It was luminescent, sleepy, and it weighed about as much as my daughter. I picked her up. I knew she was a she. And began a trek to find the nearest beach and calm ocean.
I live by the sea so most of the locations were realistic although the travel to get to beaches which I know are within a few miles was complicated by dead ends and many wrong turns and tall hedges springing out of nowhere.
And of course many mishaps occurred until I was able to get her to safety. Tension built. Danger. Opposition from mysterious strangers.
It was thrilling, adventurous.
It was like something I might write.
I’m trying to recall if I have ever used a dream in a book.
Dreams are odd things. While you are having them, they seem action-packed. There is scarcely a moment to take a breath between one scene and the next. But when you try to recount them, to someone like my husband, they are boring, annoyingly complicated, without life or flavor. They usually get the blank stare and the ‘uh huh’.
Now we all know that book dialogue is nothing like real life dialogue. And nor should it be. Real life dialogue is long-winded, dull and tangential. Book dialogue should advance plot or reveal something about the characters.
I remember the first time I decided to eavesdrop on some teenagers at a coffee bar, just to make sure my passages approximated teen speak.
Yeah, not so good. Pretty much a waste of time. Far better for my characters to be true to themselves and speak accordingly. And far better to avoid current slang by the way otherwise ten years down the road you’ll be blanking out all the ‘fa shizzles’ and ‘squees’ which pepper your writing.
And you’ll be embarrassed.
Although I do love the Battlestar Galactica-influenced trend of making up curse words and slang terms for books set in the future.
So anyway,
awesome dream does not necessarily = fabulous plot idea
But you can take pieces of it and use them.
The picture of that ethereal humanoid for instance.
That will likely remain somewhere in my subconscious.