Dreams.

[matt_doyle]

Having woken up from a dream where I meandered through the twentieth century, trying to figure out why a group of seemingly all-powerful dimension-hoppers that included eliaexraven had tommy-gunned John Lennon, I'm thinking about the nature of dreams in the creative process.

Dreaming itself is an awkward sort of creative tool, given its lack of consistency and continuity. I do have both recurring and lucid dreams with some frequency (every month or so at least), but even then, translating dream-logic into real-world terms is difficult, and not just because my dreams have an annoying tendency to reverse stairways so that they lead up to walls, and you have to jump down onto them or climb up from them to get anywhere.

For example, in last night's dream, which was very nearly lucid, I would still have difficulty explaining why John Lennon was the victim of a drive-by outside a speakeasy while one of the shooters mouthed a phrase from Handel's Messiah. I mean, there was a perfectly logical reason why they killed him (although I can't remember it), but the details... if I remember correctly, they were from an alternate-universe future, trying to adjust the past using Seldonian psychohistory so that their culture would benefit. It was at least a little more complicated than that, but as a story seed, the basic concept might be workable. At least, if it weren't for the fact that, in the dream, my own ability to time-travel was essential in tracking them down, but had no logical mechanism -- and in fact, I remember several points in the dream where my ability to time travel was retconned out of existence to make something make sense.

((I think at this point I'm just rambling -- I very much want to discuss dreams and the creative process with someone; and I really don't want to try and lecture on it, because my thoughts are disorganized and my thesis nonexistent, which, if vaguely appropriate, is still unhelpful. IM me, or comment, or email me, if this is an interesting subject to you, or if you'd like to contribute in hammering my thought pattern into something coherent and therefore useful.))

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Fascinating dream. I don't know why it is that other people's seem to be so much more interesting than mine. ;-)

The concept could make a grand story--perhaps you could find a workround for the issues with your own time-travel ability?

[matt_doyle]

True, though the last thing I need right now is another project. Three and a half stories to work on at once is plenty.

What kinds of things do you tend to dream about?

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Three and a half stories to work on at once is plenty.

That does sound like a sufficiency, or a bit more than a sufficiency, yes.

What kinds of things do you tend to dream about?

Weird architecture. Tools that won't quite do what I need them to do. Being back in high school or an undergraduate again. And, at least to judge by what's under my dreams tag on LJ, very often romantic fluff combined with awkwardnesses of one sort or another.

Once in a while I find an artefact or a text or subject of academic interest that doesn't exist in real life--sometimes I'm convinced that they exist for a good few minutes after I wake.

I used to fairly often dream about being a soldier or a guerrilla fighter in a conflict that doesn't quite make sense and which is fought with weapons that don't quite make sense, either, but I've not had so many of those dreams the past few years.

But weird architecture comes into most of my dreams. And I have no idea why.

[matt_doyle]

Apart from my brain's fixation with backwards stairways, and of course mushing several building interiors together, I *think* the architecture in my dreams is pretty normal, but then, I don't know from architecture. Sounds intriguing, though -- could you give an example?

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I've got no training in architecture, either, which is why I can't describe the weird architecture in my dreams, but it tends to be sort of oddly proportioned or just off-feeling. Staircases that are too wide and don't actually go anywhere, windows and doors that are oddly proportioned, corners that are a bit off, things like that.

I think you're on my filter that has things like dreams, although I could be wrong, but here's a description from the most recent dream that stuck with me that way:

We're travelling across a landscape, with red brick buildings and patches of trees and dusty open ground, perhaps. The buildings are of an architecture I can't quite place--the one that sticks in mind is a church with a spire. Somehow the church is squat despite its height. It seems as if the walls bulge out as they rise from the ground, then contract inwards again towards the roof, as if they'd been pushed out inside by some force--blown up like balloons, even. But it seems to have been built this way. I'm not sure if all the buildings have the same characteristic, or if it's only the church and the church sticks in my head so that it seems as if they all are much like it.

I also have dreams about building layouts that are just a little off, such as college dormitories that seem comfortable, even luxurious, but instead of everyone having rooms there are only co-ed barracks with triple-stacked bunk beds, even though the bunks are double beds. Or urban buildings where one can lift up a flap at about calf-height outside along the pavement and see the ruins of the ancient Roman city that the present city is built upon.

[matt_doyle]

Thanks! Stairways seem to do the same for me, or at least something similar, and I can now inform my fiance that it's not just my weird brain!

I've also definitely had dreams where there's a cognitive dissonance between exterior and interior space, but maybe not the same way. I'm trying to remember an example at the moment and failing.