Writer's block? Try a nap!

"Dreams are but interludes that fancy makes. When monarch reason sleeps, this mimic wakes...conspounds a medley of disjointed things that neither were nor are, nor e'er can be. Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind rush forward in the brain and come to mind."

I memorized that and a few more lines years ago from a book of quotes that my grandmother owned. I neglected to memorize who it's attributed to, but with any luck you and that specific individual will forgive me.

Gee...I hope it's not Shakespeare...

This is an article about dreams. Yes, I know I've already written one, but this one deals with them a bit differently, specifically where writing fiction and poetry are concerned.

Over thirteen years ago, I dreamed I was watching a news broadcast wherein an image of a suspected murderer "morphed" into that of his victim, and I woke thinking, "Hey...that would make a pretty cool story. Killer turns into victim."

Because I study dreams, I tend to remember mine well, and even record them on tape or in writing every so often.

It took me awhile to come up with the idea of a such a killer, and what sort of conditions could possibly exist that might allow him to assume the identity of his victim, and I wanted it to be even more out of the ordinary--the killer identical to his victim down to the fingerprints--so I made it science fiction and the suspect became an alien.

I took my animus (the male persona of who and what I wish I could be) and paired him with my anima (a female persona encompassing those aspects of myself which I may feel to be more feminine) and set them on the trail of an elusive sexual shapeshifter in the short story, Quasar 169.

I'd penned numerous stories in the past of course, a number of them fantasy or sci-fi, including a short series of genetically enhanced animal-like humans and the futuristic encounters they dealt with, but Quasar 169, rough as it was, caught the attention of my friends and co-workers who were soon asking for a sequel.

It's been published after ten years and innumerable rewrites, and I'm currently still putzing around with the 33rd installment, Red Quasar. It's had some great reviews, too!

The entire Quasar series is intimately combined with dreams. The hero, Alex Roglitz, works for a combined para-policing agency and dream research laboratory. His partner, the aforementioned Quasar 169, is a quasi-reality...that is, she is a person's dream persona set loose in the waking realm. She is the most unique feature to the stories. The closest fictional character you could compare her to would be Freddy Kreuger, and they're still worlds away from being anything like each other.

I recently posted a short story here at the Den entitled Ghost Fight. It's based on a dream I had in which I was wandering the labyrinthian basement of some abandoned structure or another and encountered a strange woman who insisted I follow her to where the ghost fights were going on. I never got to the place to see what she was talking about, but I gathered that some people had found a way to control ghosts enough to set them upon each other in little poltergeist-ish battles. When I awakened, I immediately went to the computer and started typing. I had no characters in mind, no story idea to follow...just the notion of people pitting ghosts against each other for fun.

Ghost Fight evolved as I typed it. Working a few hours at a stretch, I completed it in two days, deleting one single sentence before spell checking it and posting it to the Den. I had no idea where it was going or how it would turn out until I placed the last period. It was finished. Like some fantasy art I might begin drawing to kill time or just for fun, I knew it was over when it was over, then stood back and took a good look at it and liked what I saw.

I recall an assortment of English teachers detailing outlines on the chalkboard and making us copy them down, creating dossiers for characters before writing, making all sorts of suggestions I sneer at now. "There's no such thing as Inspiration," one guy in particular told us. "Ideas don't just come into your head out of thin air."

I'm gonna tell you that they do.

Filed in this computer I'm sitting at are 90+ story ideas I've decided are worth writing. Some are written already, some exist in a partial form, but all are summarized so I can access them and get crackin' anytime I want to submit something new. I even have them categorized by genre. A number of them are the products of dreams I've had.

In Ghost Fight, not only does that initial dream that lit the fuse make up the bulk of the tale, but I also added parts of a dream I once had where I entered a cave on the California coastline and met the ghost of a samurai warrior who offered me a challenge I had to pass, or die. When I needed a major antagonist, I introduced a voodoo queen called Barbarossa, based upon a dream I had years ago where I encountered a rotund African American woman in the basement of an abandoned property I'd once been interested in obtaining. She was chained to the walls and floor, but hovered in mid-air, crackling with electric blue arcs and static, menacing, but too cool to shy away from.

In my earlier dream-based article, I urged you to record your dreams in an effort to help you define the boundaries of your psyche and reach an understanding with your subconscious mind. Now I'm tellin' ya to at least record some of the cooler ideas you get at night for possible use as or in stories later on.

Trumpet Of The Unicorn, the first book I published, has two of my dreams in it...one featuring gigantic Brachiosaurs walking past very near me, and one featuring a Native American turning toward me abruptly to stare at me. The book was definitely inspired by Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, as that book and film left me with dozens of cool dreams and nightmares usually featuring oversized velociraptors gettin' ready to pounce on my tasty hide.

At a panel I was on last year, someone in the audience asked us, "What do you do about writer's block?" The authors who answered him claimed never to have had it, and virtually everyone in the audience scoffed. I've never had it either, but then, I can't stop coming up with new ideas when they just pop in my head nearly every night in my dreams.

If I feel like a story I'm working on is going in circles, or in some direction I'm just uncomfortable with, I like to go alone somewhere and discuss the situation aloud. I take each character and decide what I'd like ultimately to happen to them, I mention cool ideas I'd like to try and work in somehow, someway, then I move back in the story to where it seems to diverge, and I begin retelling it, adding in whatever seems cool at the moment. When I start writing again, I generally don't follow this new trail very closely, but things tend to work out as I go. If I perform this practice (I call it "Brainstorming", since that's basically all it is) more than two or three days in a row as I write, and keep thinking of new ideas as I fall asleep, it's not uncommon for a completely new and much, much cooler idea to come to me in my dreams.

Sometimes I'm Alex, sometimes I'm Geoff McKenna, sometimes I'm just with them in a dream, observing. I rarely dream an entire story that makes sense upon awakening, but I invariably dream ideas and new directions that help keep my Quasar stories sharp.

One of the more recent dreams I've had that I'm soon to bring to life was about a guy who kept appearing on different planets and on different space craft, always trying to kill off and fight everybody, yet unable to determine why, who he was, or what was compelling him and moving him around. In the dream, the source of his confusion was revealed to me, and completely blew me away. I woke up grinning, thinking, "Man! What a cool freakin' story that would be!" Now if I could just decide if I'd like it as a sci-fi short that stands on its own, or part of my Quasar universe.

What does a dream like that mean, by the way? To me, it symbolizes reincarnation, awakening into life after life, maybe repeating the same mistakes and feeling like things are out of control, then learning suddenly why we're all here and what we're really up to in this lifetime.

Ghost Fight's main premise symbolizes to me inner battles, conflict going on in the depths of my soul, something weird and wrong I really oughtta pay some attention to.

And the killer morphing into his victim? Is it our occasionally perverse justice system wherein the wrongdoers can whine their way out of the very ugly situations they themselves originally created? Does it symbolize my desire to end something innocent in my life and replace it with something far uglier? Does it represent my own descent from childhood innocence into a more sophisticated forgery?

I dunno...it was a dream I had a long time ago. But it turned into a pretty cool set of sci-fi stories!

Blocked? Go take a nap! Dr. Detetcheverrie's orders. For fun and entertainment purposes only. Go dream a story! Make your dream of becoming a better writer come true !