For a second book I started writing, I dreamt about this senile old man with a minigun walked through one of those portals in stargate and started killing these creations by the hundreds! He never ran out of ammo either! When I woke up I immediately wrote that down and it turned out to be a rather unique fantasy novel!
I had a dream I was on one of Saturn's moons on the last surviving human colony, after billions of years when the sun had run out of hydrogen and become a red giant. Humans lived in horrible conditions, and nobody understood the technology that kept everyone alive. The closest humanity had were technicians which formed the upper class of society, whose DNA had been encoded with the knowledge they needed to maintain the machines.
I think the DNA encoded memory was one of the main ideas I took from the dream, although I was amazed by how detailed and real it was. I even had a dream within the dream where I saw an image of Earth being evacuated as the sun went nova, encoded in my DNA.
But recently I got two ideas while watching music videos at the gym. I would rather by listening to books on tape but they're kinda of expensive for longer, newer ones.
One video was of a guy being beaten up by what I think was his girlfriend. I don't mean just once but in a string of ever changing scenaos. Something clicked for an idea, which would probably be very short story.
That's happened before twice. One was a weird video. It starts with the band in a cave but they were only outlined something like a negative, their bodies were filled with flames or some type of energy. That idea would be a longer story.
If I think of something even stranger I will be back.
I'm back.... I just got an idea from that shooting on Arizona. Not sure if what to think of that but people have done stories about 9/11.
[This message has been edited by LDWriter2 (edited January 13, 2011).]
I get very few ideas from dreams. If I remember a sequence, the scene does not follow a logical progression so one segment/image is all that I find is usable. I will then expand that one little segement into something workable.
Another thing I dislike is where I get into a situation where I come up with an idea I had already posted and cannot figure out how to use it differently. I have an excellent memory for the concepts my posts are based on and have not repeated them in all these years.
I think this is the first time I've had two dreams about the same character in one night. I've dreamed Honer Harrington, Dray Prescott, Harry Dresden, Star Trek and surprisingly Murder She Wrote. I've had dreams about each more then once but not in the same night.
Marla is a sorcerer and leader of a certain city. The first dream was longer, which isn't unusual for my dreams, even though I can't recall the first part- which also isn't unusual- But she wanted to talk to this lady who had some magical powers and was being careful but during the conversation Marla turned into a Gorilla, as I recalled it had something to do with the conversation, she went off the the woman and somewhere turned into a something. A man sized wingless bird or??? But she kept talking as if she had always been that way. I figured she will soon realized what happened and turn herself back but I woke before it could happen.
The second dream I forget but it was kinda short.
I suppose I could do a story partially based on the first dream.
[This message has been edited by LDWriter2 (edited July 12, 2011).]
Well, it got me laughing and thinking about what positions would be best for other mythical creatures. Then I thought about cryptozoology and cryptozoologists, and what one might do if if discovered the creatures were real. And what the government might do to protect them, like endangered species which can communicate, and poof, I had Trolling Back the Prices.
I also tend to get many ideas not exactly in my dreams (I don't remember most of them) but in that short transitional time between wakefulness and sleep. Usually I'll be able to jolt myself awake to write it down in my bedside journal, but sometimes I do lose an idea to sleep!
[This message has been edited by Osiris (edited July 12, 2011).]
Instead, I'll talk about that "wakefullness / sleep" thing that came up in the above. I usually have ideas like that...but sometimes they linger in my mind for years, and are an integral part of the process of getting to sleep.
Usually they're kind of perverse and brutal and raunchy and disgusting, unappealing as things to actually sit down and write...but sometimes, one of 'em flares up enough that I've just got to write something down or it'll bother me for, well, years. Over in the "did you write?" thread I mentioned a story like that...fortunately, it took only a couple of days to write out and shove in my files to be forgotten until it flares up again...
There are certainly markets for stuff that's perverse and brutal and raunchy and disgusting...but I'm trying for better.
I have a friend who has a manuscript for an urban fantasy about vampires. Yes, yet another one, but this one is *fresh*, because she really tried to make the wainscoting world make sense, and turned up a number of original angles on the the urban vampire story.
Dreams are a rich mine of potent imagery, although I've also dreamed reasonably complete and workable solutions to engineering problems I've been wrestling with, or which convinced me to take a certain course when faced with a life changing decision. I suspect dreams sometimes reflect our brains' attempts to integrate our experiences of the prior day into our psyche, which is why if you are wrestling with something it sometimes appears in an unexpected or cryptic way in your dreams.
Writing *The Wonderful Instrument* was one of those things I chose to do in waking life because of a vivid, compelling dream. I was having a recurring dream which I've since discovered is quite common among aspiring authors: the one in which you pick up an unfamiliar musical instrument and discover to your delight that you can play it with effortless beauty. I take the "meaning" of the dream (a term I use cautiously here because I don't believe dreams necessarily have meaning) that one is struggling with a feeling that there is something unexpected inside you that you must show the world.
18 years later that little spark is my 100k sci-fi novel.
Well, it was a small spark...
Axe
Axe--you know what they say about forest fires.. Yours took a while to smolder but sounds like it got a nice little fire going there.
I thought to myself what if deserts had waves of sand. That's how I came up with - the nowhere run-
Also, that would be a fun contest. Maybe just 13 lines, or possibly a longer one like the current WotF contest of 3k words max.
The question is, what would the prize be?
Axe