3 Things to Try for a Dream Sequence

“I wear the cheese; it does not wear me.”  — the Cheese Man during the dream sequences in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Restless.”

I knew after I read a glossary entry on dreams in gothic fiction that I wnated to do a dream sequence in one of my stories.  I had a place in my book where the possibility opened up that I could do one.  But then I had to think about not only what makes a bad dream sequence, but what makes a good one.  Using one can’t be taken lightly–if you find an agent list of what they don’t want to see, a dream sequence is near the top of it.

Here are the three things I came up with:

1. Give it a purpose. I admit–the previous dream sequences I did were because I thought they were cool and neat.  And they ended up on the cutting room floor because they didn’t do anything for the story.  A dream needs a purpose for being in the story, whether it’s to develop characterization or move the plot forward.  What I did is have a dream repeat an event the reader saw but that the character didn’t.  It becomes a major turning point later in the story when he realizes why he had it means they are in a whole lot of trouble–trouble he might not be able to fix.

2. Size matters. Forensics & Faith blog notes:

I see no point in page after page of a dream sequence. And if it is long, it’s probably not written in true “dream format.”

I was thinking that when I followed some of the surreal elements that dreams have, the sequence really couldn’t run that long.  It’d grow tiresome for the reader because it doesn’t read like normal narrative.  So shorter is better.  Mine came in at 239 words.

3. Surreal. What’s a dream without the weird stuff?  Sometimes you can have a dream where you’re in someone else’s body.  Or you might be in one place and then you’re suddenly in another place entirely.  Even some of the images, like the Cheese Man, can add to the flavor of the sequence.   I used an antique bicycle for one of the strange pieces of imagery.  I hesitate to suggest reading a dream dictionary though to try to put in images that mean specific things.  The problem is that the reader may not associate that image with that meaning–much better to let them try to figure out what the image means.

By the way, I bet the meaning of the Cheese Man is that it started out as an inside joke as relating to someone on the show and turned into something entirely different!

 

Dreams in Fiction

Okay, I’ll admit it–I’ve written some dreams into my fiction.  One involved red hair that erupted from the sea and grabbed someone.  The other, which both co-writer and I came up with for Valley of Bones (no relation to the published title) involved pumpkins falling off a cart.  We were talking about what the dream meant …

And that should have been a clue that it didn’t belong in the story.  I think dreams are fascinating things to writers; certainly they were fascinating to me.  All kinds of places to put hidden meaning and symbolism.  TV and film are also be a big influence.  I ran a search on the Internet for ‘dream sequence,’ and all the topics the came first were about movies and TV. 

But those are a different form of writing than books, and may be one of the reasons why dreams aren’t as effective in books.  I’ve think I’ve read only two or three books that actually used dreams in some context.  One was written by Laurell K. Hamilton, and the dream was a memory of the character’s mother being killed that segued into real-life zombie attack.  The other one was a paranormal where the chief bad guy was invading the main character’s head.  I think Sue Grafton may have done one, too, with something similar to LKH.  But on each occasion, it was clear what the dream meant, and it was a major part of the story.

Never anything with hidden meaning and symbolism.  On hindsight, as I thought about the ones I tried to do, I realized chances are the reader isn’t going to get the hidden meaning.  Bad if it’s important that they get it.  If it’s not important that they get it, then why is the dream in the story?

If I were going to use a dream now:

No  info dumps in dreams.  I think sometimes writers resort to dreams because they’re trying to figure out how to get the backstory, so they show the character dreaming the scene.  It’s still an info dump!

I’d also keep it somewhere in the middle of the story–certainly not the beginning.  Reading something that gets me interested and then finding out it’s a dream is not cool.  This just has too many negative connotations that turn people off.

Finally, I’d make the dream more straight forward and something that’s related in the context of the story.  It needs to be an integral part of the story and obvious to the reader that it is something important.