This morning I had a dream where my dog and I were kidnapped and two young, rich guys tried to trick me into giving her blue pills. They gave her the first one and it made her really sick. I didn’t want her to swallow the pills, so I instead shoved them down her throat, knowing that the second no one was looking at her, she’d spit them out. The rich guys fell for the act and left us alone until they wanted me to give her another pill. Eventually, I was able to find the bottle where the pills came from which had all natural ingredients labeled on it, the most present being acorn. This relieved me a little bit. However, I still didn’t want my dog taking pills that made her sick, so I continued the façade. Then, a skunk with huge bug-like wings sticking out of its back appeared in the dream and tried to bite me. I soon discovered that the rich guys were doing experiments on animals to get useless bug wings to stick out of their backs. Thankfully, my dog hadn’t swallowed any of the pills so she remained normal. But that still won’t keep me from never wanting to eat another acorn as long as I remember this dream.
Most of my dreams are stranger, and often more frightening, than this one. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I rarely seem to have what I call “normal dreams.” Perhaps there isn’t such a thing, but it sure seems like it to me when I hear others talk about what they dreamed.
One observation that Neil Gaiman made on his website is that it’s hard to take a dream and turn it into a good story because the logic differs from the logic of everyday life- which I also think of as “dream incoherency”. I tend to agree with him in this aspect, especially since you can see that the above dream paragraph didn’t flow as well as it should have. I also have troubles transcribing my dreams because of my habit of “rewriting” them. Often, I’ll start over somewhere in the dream and have a completely different sequence happen afterwards. Once that happens enough times, I’ll easily lose track of what events happened by the time I wake up. Yet, despite the troubles of forming a dream into a coherent piece of writing, I think it would be an interesting experiment for a writer. To be able to take an incoherent story from when your mind was in a lucid state and then turn it into a readable work of fiction would help with fleshing out descriptions and the plot setup, as well as with putting fragmented ideas into story format. Besides, after the Beginning Short Story class I had a year ago, I’ve come to the opinion that many writers do turn dreams- or drug-induced hallucinations- into stories. I’d be scared if the writers my TA had us read wrote their stories while wide awake and sober.
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