Dream Sequences - Love Them or Loathe Them?

[Spockydog]

Has anyone here ever had a dream that has had a direct, practical impact on any aspect of their life? No? Didn't think so.

So why do writers keep including them in their stories?

I love Laird Barron. He's one of my favourite living authors. But I recently abandoned his latest book when it became apparent that the second half was basically of a bunch of extended dream sequences.

There are no stakes in a dream, because it isn't really happening. Therefore, tension is impossible. And without tension, your story probably sucks.

 

[Buckwheat]

I thought it was just me. I mostly forget about the dreams of chatacters because they never seem important enough to me.

And the stories where the ending is "and the protagonist wakes up and realises it was all a dream" are always a disappointment.

[Darth Richard II]

Does inception count?

[Spockydog]

1 minute ago, Buckwheat said:

And the stories where the ending is "and the protagonist wakes up and realises it was all a dream" are always a disappointment.

Tell me about it. I just watched Episode 7 of Mr Robot's second season. I won't be watching any more.

 

[Darth Richard II]

BUffy Season 4 Episode 22 Restless is awesomesuace, but I'm struggling to think of any in books that I can remember, let alone liked. I thin they work better on film.

[Spockydog]

6 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Does inception count?

Hmm. Probably not, because they weren't even real dreams. The environments were basically programmed, and though asleep, the protagonists were still conscious.

That is why I can fucking hate dream sequences and still love that movie.

 

[Buckwheat]

14 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

BUffy Season 4 Episode 22 Restless is awesomesuace, but I'm struggling to think of any in books that I can remember, let alone liked. I thin they work better on film.

I read a book recently where it appeared in the end, I am not how not to spoil it now ... but it is a German fantasy book.

Spoiler

Walter Moers: Die wilde Reise durch die Nacht (the English title must be something like The Wild Voyage trough the Night?)

And I was listening to an obscure radio drama where the same thing happened and I was a bit disappointed in the end too by that ending.

[Darth Richard II]

Angel had a few really bad it was all a dream episodes. Also see oh we were on the holodeck the whole time Trek.

I usually don't mind the occasion dream sequence if it's doing the prophecy/warning about the future forshadowing stuff...but I still can't think of any good recent examples in lit, so.

[unJon]

Dream sequences meant to give insight into a character or show a character's subconscious realizing a "truth" the character POV doesn't grasp are true to life (at least my life). Agree about no tension, but I don't think that equates to a blanket rule to not include them in books. Taken to its extreme such a rule would lead to not including any characters inner monologue in a book. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

The golden rule of dream sequences is make it clear to the reader at the outset that this is a dream. "He woke up and it was all a dream" is basically the biggest cop-out in literature.

Otherwise, I don't mind them: they serve a purpose by showing the character's psychology. If you have a character afflicted with nightmares, it makes sense to show these nightmares at least once.

[The Marquis de Leech]

There's even a (minor) dream sequence in The Lord of the Rings.

[Jo498]

It all depends on how it is done. The cheap cop out "he woke up and it was only a dream" is lame but it is also an age-old device (not sure how old, though).

One of my favorite ghost stories features a recurring dream/nightmare (Benson: The room in the tower, findable online). One of the greatest proto-fantasy novels, Count Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript oscillates frequently between episoded the protagonist only dreamed/hallucinated and supposedly experienced in reality; the reader frequently cannot tell which is which but it adds to the fascination of the narrative.

[C Rutherford]

Maybe the lack is in me, but I find most authors, even really good authors, often fumble with the whole dream bit.  I think in part because a lot of them usually seem to want to blur the lines between the novel's established 'reality' and the dream.  Too many authors for me try to use a dream as a means of shifting the lines of the perceived reality and there is almost a sense of 'ha ha tricked you' being attempted. 

Sometimes this actually works.  Sometimes it pulls back another layer that can be fascinating; add nuance and reveal another facet of the author's imagination.  But most often I tend to find it is used in a way that comes off as self-indulgent on the author's part. 

 

But for me, an author has to be really skilled at using his writing talent to explore this area since it requires a really well defined, balanced and engaging "reality" the author has established and is able to maintain as the offset and basically as the defining parameters of real versus dream.

Now if dreams are integral to the plot, I have no problem.  If a character somehow employs dreams or dreams employ that character directly as one of the engines of progression in the plot, I have much less, if any, of a problem with that (I say less probably over more because some authors do this pretty bad as well).

[polishgenius]

Like unJon says, when it's a dream sequence that tells you something about the character then that's fine, especially if it manages to also convey the chaotic crazy nature of an actual dream. Those are rare though.

The ones which are just there to raise cheap tension without any actual danger are, of course, dreadful.

I like a dream sequence in a fantasyland or magical realism if prophecy or far-seeing is a facet of the mythos. They can be nicely eerie and give a taster of epicness that the series isn't otherwise ready to go to yet.  aSoIaF uses dreams excellently, for example, as does the first half of the Eye of the World (although the fact that the dream sequences were the only bits of the first half of the Eye of the World I thought were done well has a lot to do with why I've never read any further).


On the other hand a dream sequence telling a character something they don't already know and this turning out to be true in a setting where that sort of thing is not a part of the story is one of my pet hates and immediately devalues the entire story for me if it proves crucial to the plot (which it usually does). TDKR did this, as did Gravity.

I can think of one 'and then they woke up' that really worked, mind (spoilers for Zelda: Link's Awakening):

when it turns out that the entire world is a dream, of another being, that you're trapped in and your entire quest is to defeat the monsters keeping it artificially asleep to free it and yourself. Since due to the nature of the sleeper this dream has become a living world, you're essentially committing a minor apocalypse and this is played quite well.

[maarsen]

Just about everything Phil Dick wrote could fall under this. Whether drug induced or caught in alternate realities, this was the stuff fictions are made of. 

[C.T. Phipps]

It depends what the purpose of the dream was.

Does it reveal something direly important about the main character?

Does it forward the main plot?

If so, yes, I think they're awesome.

[Zorral]

Loathe them, on screen even more than on the page.

However, oddly enough, a Canadian television series that I've fallen in love with, Murdoch Mysteries, uses a version of dream sequence when Detective Murdoch is exercising his almost-visionary ability to re-imagine a criminal action. This comes when he's got a lot of information gathered about the crime and / or criminal and he's attempting to puzzle out exactly what happened, and how, and by whom.

He also possesses a bit of what might called clairavoyance, though no one suggests any such thing, a bit of glimpsing his future.  And in one episode he has something that we call a near death experience that allows his "soul" -- "intelligence"  "ghost"  -- to move about in the area of the crime and to see a bit of both past and present of victim and possible killers -- this worked very well.  It works particularly well as a manifestation of the idea and theories that people of the time of the series were interested in.  Some of them got dismissed as crackpotism after WWII in particular, but made for very popular fiction.  One of his colleagues writes the stuff even.

So, yah, it can work, but it should be worked out far more carefully than most writers bother to do, who are using dream sequences as a shorthand for character maybe -- and it's lazy writing.  The Sopranos did that all the time and that is among the reasons I don't rate that series as highly as so many do.

 

 

[polishgenius]

14 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Loathe them, on screen even more than on the page.

However, oddly enough, a Canadian television series that I've fallen in love with, Murdoch Mysteries, uses a version of dream sequence when Detective Murdoch is exercising his almost-visionary ability to re-imagine a criminal action. This comes when he's got a lot of information gathered about the crime and / or criminal and he's attempting to puzzle out exactly what happened, and how, and by whom.

 

 

Did it steal this off Hannibal, or did Hannibal steal this from it?

[unJon]

24 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

 

Did it steal this off Hannibal, or did Hannibal steal this from it?

Hannibal? Murdoch? Obviously they both stole from the A Team. 

[Zorral]

If you're referring to Hannibal the television series -- Murdoch Mysteries (first series dates to 2008), and the books by Maureen Jennings that the series based itself on began being published in the late 1990's.

There have been 9 Murdoch Mysteries seasons so far; season 10 will broadcast this fall on CBC.

The writers, and probably Jennings herself appear to have an authentic love for the expressions of culture, science, technology and the issues of the 1890's, and how the figures in Toronto of the time dealt with them.  As part of portraying a time and place in Toronto through murder mysteries and their solutions the series brings onstage and into the plots a large variety of recognizable period figures, such as -- ta dah! -- Arthur Conan Doyle, who more than once visits Toronto -- and at least once within the context of his dream of making connection with the dead. There are frequent references among the regular cast of characters, at least in the first seasons, to Doyle's work.  

Beyond that -- quoting from the Toronto Star:

Quote

Murdoch has fictionalized historical figures such as Mark Twain, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Harry Houdini, Winston Churchill and Bat Masterson in the past. Horror author H.P. Lovecraft will figure in a Season 10 plo

For me personally, a great deal of the charm of MM is that it IS located in Toronto and Canada.  The characters on occasion have troubles with the U.S. in various ways, not excluding institutions such as Columbia University which have more money than the institutions in Toronto and Canada getting fossils found in Canadian soil.  It's all very slick, yet feels down home and real. Well, one either likes this sort of thing or one doesn't.  Whereas I don't have it in me to like something Hannibal, I love this.

 It's seldom that the writers' invention, creativity and wit fail an episode.  In truth, I'm quite in awe of them keeping this up for 10 years!  Though as I'm only half way through the seasons so far, I really admire how the writing and plotting revolve around so much of the times so creatively and with such high quality.  So much so I don't understand why Murdoch Mysteries still seems mostly unnoticed in the U.S., especially among those who love Sherlock Holmes, science, technology and inventions since it is available both from netflix and acorn that USians.