I’m sure we’ve all had those dreams where you THINK it would make a good movie/short story/novel/song…then you think about it or maybe think about telling someone and you realize …‘enh. its a bit crap.’
But have any for you actually passed muster? Or have you actually used it to write a story?
I ask cause I had one that would at least pass for a pulp 50’s short story. Earth’s flora runs amuck. Tries to wipe out animal life, mostly humans. Pretty typical. And as in the Swamp Thing Floronic Man story, the plants don’t realize they are dooming themselves wiping out their source of carbon dioxide.
But where this deviates from anything I might have thought up myself is in an oxygen-rich atmosphere surviving humans evolves to become ‘Supermen’. (A very 50’s conceit).
And to top off the 50’sishness is the coda: “There’s no communicating with them.(The plants) Nothing to stop them from self-destruction. All we ever taught them was to hate and ultimately wipe themselves out.”
Pan up to the stars…BLAM the perfect 50’s short story!
I had a dream many years ago in which a cowboy chorus rode into the sunset, singing a song. When I awoke, I realized that by adding one line and modifying another, I got a perfectly good rondeau. It’s about being genetically exceeded by one’s child.
I wrote a sonnet about one of my dreams. Since I’m hardly an accomplished poet, I’ll put it in spoilers.
Summary
The waves have become calm, their crashing hushed
to a low murmuring that soothes the ear.
Soon the sun will slip into the sea, washed
from the sky. The air is grown cold and clear.
And the running woman has almost reached
the horizon. The murderer, face pale
with fury, gallops close behind. Etched
in the sand is his horse’s churning trail.
The woman runs without shoes, and sunlight
gleams against her footprints, crimson on red.
Blood pools in the depressions, still fresh, quite
warm, although the woman has long since fled.
Her path–the murderer’s trail close beside–
will vanish underneath the rising tide.
I had a dream once (I think I may have posted about it here a long time ago), where I was a character in a musical. I was aware I was dreaming, and was also aware that I was creating this musical as I was dreaming.
It was a musical comedy about the Nazis, but in my dream I knew I couldn’t call them “Nazis,” so they were called “Snazzis” (rhymes with razzies). And instead of Adolph Hitler, the main character was renamed Magnus Schurff. Being a character in the dream, my role (and the main plot of the musical) was to get close to Magnus, gain his trust, become his right-hand man and then ultimately murder him.
I remember songs being a big part of the dream, and as I was dreaming them, thinking “I have to write these down when I wake up. This is some amazing stuff!” Funny songs, emotional ballads, everything a good musical has. Woke up and didn’t remember any of them, but the plot stuck with me.
It seems to be a rule in my dreams, that when they start to take on a somewhat constructed story path, that is when some stupid thing happens to divert it into a more chaotic realm again. I seem helpless to follow that stupid path.
In many ways that reflects my real life.
I was very disappointed just a few days ago, when a favourite actor of mine showed up as a character in my dream, Donald Sutherland at his current well seasoned age. And of course the alarm went off.
So in spite of my ability to actually write a somewhat decent short story in real life. My dreams thwart me.
I’m in awe of your subconscious selves! Most of my best dreams are only fragments, and the rest of them are invariably just me trying to accomplish something but getting distracted or bogged down by details.
I had a dream that was the first part of a science fiction story. I wrote it down and it was fine…but I didn’t have the rest of the story and my conscious self could not come up with anything of the same quality.
I’ve had music dreams before, unfortunately, I’m not sure how to link the music to this thread. There was music about one year ago, accompanying a dream of a Space Shuttle blasting off, I recorded some of it.
I also have had some vivid/weird bad dreams, such as Asian men vanishing mysteriously in a grocery store and I was asking bystanders to accompany me at all times so something wouldn’t happen to me. Not sure how cinematic that would be though.
Both, and often. For example, this post was spawned by a dream:
Other dreams make up brand new episodes of TV shows, some of which have been off the air for decades, or have me playing video games which sometimes don’t exist. Then there’s this which combined a TV show and a video game:
I had a dream just the other night that was very detailed and story-like, though maybe too derivative to make into an actual original story.
It was an apocalyptic setting where much of the population had died from some disease. I was a 14 year old, but not the actual 14 year old I was more than 40 years ago, I was a completely different person. Which I thought was strange after I woke up, because I sometimes dream of myself as younger, but almost always as myself.
I was traveling with my mother, who in the dream was also a completely different person than my actual mother. She seemed to be indifferent or actually hostile toward me, as if in her struggle for survival she resented having a kid to look after. We had been traveling around searching for food and supplies, but had returned to our old home to look for anything useful we had left behind.
This wasn’t a complete apocalypse, because there were still people around and the electricity was still on. It was like the Black Plague in Europe, where maybe 2/3 of the population had died. So enough people still around to keep the lights on, but otherwise society had largely broken down. I set down on the ground the backpack and rifle I had been carrying and went in the house. The TV was on, and a military-style parade was being shown-- the government in charge, such as it was, was in a war with some other faction, and they were desperately trying to recruit more soldiers from what was left of the population for their war effort. So they were going to a lot of effort to stage a flashy parade that would make their cause seem just and noble. I thought, while watching the recruitment parade events, what a waste it was to go to all this trouble, just to get even more of the few remaining people killed in a pointless war.
When I went back outside I saw that someone had come along and stolen my backpack of supplies (which was mostly candy and some snack items) and my rifle. I silently cursed myself for being so careless. There was an RV on our property that had been used as a sick bed area, and I knew there was an army-style duffel bag in there I could use to replace my backpack. so I went in to get it. Which was unpleasant because there were several corpses in there who had died of the disease.
I think I woke up then because that’s all I remember.
Once I dreamt that me and a friend who had recently passed away were caught in The Brooklyn Museum after closing and we had to figure out each room so that we could get out. These escape rooms included the decorative arts and periods rooms and the Egyptian collection. So vivid! Wore up and told my husband and he said, “That would make a great movie!”
About 5 years later A Night at the Museum came out and hubby only half jokingly said we should sue the studio for stealing my dream.
I don’t play any instrument and can’t write music, but I sometimes dream of being a musician (most times a guitarist or a drummer) and singing my own very good songs, at least I think so in my dreams. I sometimes remember the melodies for a short time after waking up, but this only lasts for minutes and since I don’t have the musical skills to write them down, they are forever lost. Who knows, maybe I have written a song as good as “Satisfaction” like Keith Richards did in his dreams, but he had a guitar and a tape recorder next to his bed to record it.
Well, I just had a good dream last night that might be suitable for cinema - I dreamt about the American World War II pilots who had to fly over “The Hump” - the extremely dangerous Himalayan route to ferry supplies from India to China.
I often dream apocalypses, various iterations of zombies, plagues, aliens or rogue AIs; sometimes also more exotic things, like dinosaurs, and once, people just kind of collectively gave up and lay down to die. Those do often feature lengthy coherent sequences, but pretty generic ones—hiding in dilapidated buildings, trying to escape various pursuers, and so on. But nothing that would make for anything more than the thinnest sort of plot.
There’s one dream that’s stuck with me, however. In it, I basically lived out my life—some good times, some bad times, mostly middling times—up to its very end (which came in a care facility aboard a space station). Then things got somewhat abstract—colors, stars, a sense of being judged, and found wanting; a sense of needing to do better. Then I woke up.
I thought that could make a somewhat ‘Groundhog Day’-like narrative: having to live your life again from a certain point until you get it right. And it’d be a glas-half-full type of question whether it’s a horror movie…
I’ve been fighting Covid for the last couple of weeks (no major symptoms, just a general overall sluggishness) and it’s given me some vivid, memorable dreams. In one of them, I was watching a movie from the 90s I thought I had seen before and forgotten how good it was; it actually took a few minutes after I woke up to realize it never existed.
In the movie, Linda Fiorentino plays a Lady Macbeth-type who manipulates her husband into a ruthless takeover of the New York mob. Then it turns out she was a Russian spy all along. When all is revealed, one fed agent says to another, “A screw and a shrew, and we never knew who was who.”
I have no idea what that line means, but I’m still laughing about it. David Mamet, eat your heart out.