Writing dream sequences, by Elizabeth Kay

 

Venezuela

As this is a difficult post to illustrate, I am using a couple of photos of husband Bob asleep at airports around the world.

 Dreams are two-edged swords. Inexperienced writers frequently use them as a substitute for reality, so that they can write in a surrealist way, drop in a plot clue, and get away with it. Ending a story with the line it was all a dream is the biggest cop-out of the lot. Dreams aren’t really like reality at all.

 Lucid dreams are dreams when you realise you are dreaming, and can actually make decisions about the direction the action will take, and if you’ve ever had one they can give you a real insight into what dreaming is like. There are ways of testing whether you’re asleep, as well. Electricity doesn’t work in a predictable way, and turning on a light won’t work. Most dreams are predominantly visual, with a bit of sound thrown in, and the occasional sensation. It is very unusual to smell something in a dream, or to taste anything either. Nor can you see absolutely everything – only the objects that are important will be on view, and turning round in a circle to survey the whole scene is impossible. You can feel emotions, though, and very powerfully too. The most obvious one is fear, during a nightmare, but sorrow and euphoria are almost as common.

The only lucid dream I have ever had – apart from those rare flashes when at the last moment you can choose to wake up – I was walking through a wood. I can remember it really clearly: the red and gold of the autumn leaves on the path, the trees on either side, the sight of a clearing up ahead. It was really peaceful and lovely, and I knew I could actually decide which path I was going to take, which was going to be the most enormous fun as I could go anywhere. I was in charge, and I could do as I liked. And then I realised I couldn’t hear anything at all, the walk was taking place in absolute silence, no birdsong, no rustling foliage, no crunching of dry leaves underfoot. And that was how I knew for certain I was dreaming. And the moment I knew that for sure, I woke up to the most enormous feeling of disappointment as I could have done absolutely anything.

Madagascar

The most successful dream story, in my opinion, is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Impossible things happen all the time. Animals speak, characters grow bigger and smaller, and one thing can change into another for no apparent reason. A baby becomes a piglet, a cat slowly vanishes until only its grin is left. And, maybe most important of all, scenes change without warning. Falling down a well, going through a door, Alice usually finds herself somewhere else entirely, that bears no relationship to the place she’d just left. Dreams can be very useful, of course, to illustrate worries a character might have, both conscious and subconscious. Dreaming you can fly is very common, and usually relies on a sudden realisation that all you have to do is think you can, and up you go. I believe this has been associated with a change of posture, which has made part of your anatomy go numb. Nightmares can also be used to re-live bad experiences, and trigger memories. But keep them short. They’re not real, and readers crave a reality they can believe in for the length of the novel.

These nightmares are from a work in progress, and refer to previous events in the book:

I had another nightmare that night. Someone was trying to drag me out of the truck and put me into a woven basket that was far too small for me. Daniel was standing in front of a market stall full of fruit and vegetables (labelled British Consulate), holding two rucksacks full of bananas and shaking his head.

…and once again, I had a nightmare, only this time I was surrounded by ten-year-old boys with AK-47s who wanted to push me into a pit full of puff adders. So I pushed past them through a curtain, and found myself in Nairobi airport just after the flight I wanted had left.

 In the end I found a tree on which I could hook the sheet to make a sort of tent, so I lay down on the ground beneath it and tried to go to sleep. It wasn’t very comfortable, and when I’d finally resigned myself to getting no sleep at all I suddenly found myself in the middle of a real nightmare, when I had a sack over my head again and someone had set fire to it and I couldn’t get out. I was beating and beating against it with my hands, and I woke myself up by hitting myself round the face. Shaken, I thought I was too scared to go back to sleep but then it was suddenly morning and through a gap in the sheet I could see a flock of the most beautiful birds – a species of starling, probably, pecking the ground all around me.

 In that extract, I’ve used the contrast of the birds on waking to emphasise the horror of the dream.

My own dreams, when I occasionally remember them, tend to focus on something I’ve forgotten to do. Several years ago, I ordered a book that was difficult to obtain as present for someone. I was absolutely certain it had arrived, as I remembered it had been raining and the brown paper around it had been wet. But I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I searched the house from top to bottom for two days, only for it to arrive in the post on the third day. I realised I must have dreamt the whole thing: dreams can seem very very real. When I decided to write this, I kept my notebook within reach and jotted down what had woken me up at 3am.

 I was on some sort of group holiday with husband Bob, and I was sitting in a room full of people which had a bay window and rather old-fashioned furniture. I had been the one carrying the train tickets we needed for the following day, but when I looked through my bag I couldn’t find them, and then the bag fell apart. I decided I needed to walk back to the station where I’d bought them on my own, in case I’d dropped them, and Bob offered to lend me a child’s scooter for the journey. I have no idea what country we were in, as I couldn’t remember what the tickets actually looked like, only that they’d been in a script I couldn’t read.

When I woke up it felt very real, and I was really anxious. When I realised it had all been a dream I was thoroughly relieved. The emotions involved had been all too real, boring as the topic was. I have no desire to use it in any piece of writing!

Think carefully before you use a dream. It’s not as easy as it looks.