Saturday 9th January 2021
I rarely get ideas from dreams. Mostly my dreams are a mixup of continuously changing ideas, each scene changing one piece of continuity so that by the end, the dream is very different to how it started.
Even when there is something that feels concrete, it fades so quickly from memory that by the time I’ve woken up enough to write it down, it’s disappeared like dust in a hurricane.
Sometimes there’s a strong central idea, from which I can merge in a bunch of other ideas to get a story.
But last night was the first time I had a dream that was almost a complete short story. I say almost. It felt like one of those TV programmes you have on in the background while you’re doing something else, where you sort of know what happened by the end but you have to guess some details. I’d say it was about 80% there.
And when I started thinking about it, it took me about 30 minutes to get the other 20%.
I even have a name for it: The Shop At The Bottom Of The Hill.
I’ve started on my first Audiobook of the year. I’m Listening to The Invisible Life Of Addie Larue as I do some character leveling in Warcraft. I’m not too far into it, but it feel a beautiful book and I think it’s brought the dreams out in me.
I know already my story has no dialogue; that the protagonists are I and You.
The weird thing is that in my dream, it was about someone I know from my childhood. Usually people in my dreams are the result of having been discussed or thought about during the day. This wasn’t the case, and resulted in being the thing that gives this story its plot.
I will write it, but I’m not sure when. I have a short story submission window coming up and I was going to rewrite a short story from a few years back that I love. I’m not sure if this is suitable for the publication but I may write this instead.
It was definitely a rare dream, one the like I’ve not had before. I’ve always been a bit jealous of those people that say ideas for stories come to them fully formed in dreams. Now, I’ve had it happen… I kinda want it to happen more often.
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