As I’m sure lots of people do, I occasionally have a dream so vivid and awesome that, sometimes even before I wake up, I know that I have to write it down before I forget it.
Many a time I have blearly fumbled about at 5am tryin to find a pencil and paper upon which to quickly lay down at least the skeleton of the epic plot which just played out in my mind. I’ve even, in the event of no traditional writing implements being forthcoming, fired up my computer and squinted into the harsh, searing light of the monitor as I typed out the finer points of my inevitable masterpiece.
However, as we know, what’s true in the land of dreams doesn’t nessecary hold in the waking world. Often, when reading through my early morning scribbles with eyes and mind unclouded by sleep, the gaping plot holes, bad logic and even just plain non-eventness of what I’ve written is painfully clear.
I remember I once had a dream in which the solution to a scientific dilema facing the real world suddenly became painfully clear to me. I was overjoyed! I’d be able to help so many people. I’d be a hero of the scientific community. I dragged myself from sleep so that could write down the solution for the sake of all humanity. Unfortunately, as I laid out my world changing theory it slowly dawned that I was, in fact, writting down complete nonsense. I forget the specifics, but at one point I’m sure I had assumed that 1=2, or something like that (because if it did, then everything else would have worked).
I was gutted. For about 2 minutes. Then I smiled, laughed at myself and went back to sleep.
Y’see, while such waking world revalations are always a dissapointment, I always take heart in the fact that despite a lack of translation it was still an awesome dream at the time.
When I was a kid I actually cried once after waking to find that I didn’t actually own the X-wing fighter toy I’d been playing with in my dream, but I can still remember that dream because I had so much fun in it! It’s that soul filling buzz of excitement and engagement that is so hard to find anywhere else.
And no matter how disjointed or illogical a dream may appear under the scrutiny of a waking mind, there’s usually at least one or two ideas present that can be taken out and developed in and of themselves (or even slotted into an existing work in progress).
Of course, sometimes, you return to an early morning transcript and find something that, quite simply, defies any real classification.
‘Wolverine’ on missin of revenge
Location: old, abandoned building (like deans high)
Scavenger tribes of kids loot the remains for equipment (still finding burned bodies)
StructurAl degredaTion puts the kids in peril.
‘Wolverine’ saves them
Cue confrontation
They are led by a big black dude. He is actaully a morphic mutant who can change his shape into sinewy, snake/whip lime tentAcles (kind of Akira ish). He has traveled the galaxy absorbing hundreds.
Has incredible regenerative powers
He can be killed by stressing the regeneration of his ‘brain’ to such a degree that there is a miliseco d interuption in the retransfere of his knowledge.
His knowldedge (of all the identities of people he has consumed) is in a huge computer type apparTus on a distant world. Connected Via FTP transfers.
Quite.
Greyfried's Unfinished Works 