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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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.))
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.))
