The Night Shift: Using Dreams to Write More Interesting Stories
I’m driving in a car with my mother, inside a movie theater. The side mirror clips the concession stand and breaks off. I turn and say to her, “Well, I guess there’s no looking back now.”
In a barren, post-apocalyptic desert, three war-grizzled men stand beside a giant, dilapidated Ferris Wheel and argue over who will pay for candy bars sold by a wandering refugee.
I’m skateboarding down Market Street in San Francisco. I swerve among revelers at a street fair, singing, “Whee! Whee!” I’m painted entirely in gold.
Crazy scenes. What could they be about? I wondered that myself. They were all messages from “The Night Shift,” as my husband calls it—scenes from my dreams.
Dreams can be a rich reservoir of material for fiction writing, and I record and use my dreams as writing prompts all the time. I highly recommend it.
(Keeping Dreams Alive in Fiction.)
When we dream, our subconscious churns over ideas and issues that are pulling at us—anything that we’re trying to understand in our waking life—and depicts them in images. That’s exactly what fiction does as well. When we write stories, we take what’s poking at our minds and dramatize it, playing it out in a scene.
So what a perfect gift our dreams give us: When we go to sleep, they continue drafting scenes for us, and in the morning they present us with material more vivid and creative than our waking minds could ever conjure.
Everybody dreams. But what if you don’t remember your dreams when you wake up? Surprisingly, this can be learned, and quickly. Several years ago I took a dream class taught by a woman named Lael Gold. She told us to write down our dreams as soon as we woke up. Title your dreams, she said. What were the most memorable images? Feelings? The more we did this, she promised, the more we would start to remember. And that’s what happened, for all of us in the class.
One quirk of dreams that’s especially fun for writers is their frequent use of word play. It’s like your subconscious is sending you coded messages to puzzle out. Sometimes the word play is oblique and sometimes it jumps out at you once you start writing things down.
One friend of mine had a dream about her mother, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer. They were walking in an airplane terminal. She woke up and couldn’t stop thinking about the word “terminal.” I’ve had dreams where I’m literally “lost at sea” or “on the wrong path.” I’ve driven in countless vehicles that were breaking down. And don’t get me started on gross toilets. The more you talk, think, and write about your dreams, the more vividly you’ll start to remember the ideas your subconscious pitches to you while you are asleep.
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The great thing about dream logic is that anything can happen. A chair can turn into a flying boat; an olive in a martini glass can talk to you; you can open a door and suddenly be in another world. And this flexes fiction writing muscles as well. We sometimes forget that anything can happen when we’re making stuff up in a story. Why not add a touch of the surreal? Why not stretch the boundaries of what’s possible? Stories are inherently metaphorical. It can be fun to push that and see where it takes you.
A few years ago I had a series of dreams about a bear. In one dream, I opened the door and saw a giant bear, and instead of slamming the door, I let the bear inside. In another dream, the bear wore a circus outfit and dragged its gums along the neck of my frightened friend. In another, it rustled in the bushes and signaled to me while a corner store flooded with water, washing people outside. All of those visions made it into a story called “The Bear.”
For the movie theater dream, I wrote about the dizzying carpet of geometrical patterns lining the path between multiplex doors, the ornate staircase as wide as my living room, and the giant dioramas of coming attractions, including one with a dog driving a car with a man cowering in the back seat. What to title it? Thinking of the clipped mirror, I wrote, “Concessions.” My God, I thought, what a loaded word. To drive in a car with one’s mother and crash into the physical manifestation of concessions. I never could have thought of that myself—on the day shift, that is.
So I wrote a story called “Concessions,” about a mother and daughter coming to terms. It begins in a movie theater, and the movie they’re watching is, of course, about three war-grizzled men arguing over candy bars in front of a rusted-out Ferris Wheel. The mother and daughter end up in the middle of a raucous street fair, where they get their faces painted, the daughter’s done entirely in gold. For all that, I can thank the Night Shift.
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