Dream Sequences - Love Them or Loathe Them?

[polishgenius]

28 minutes ago, Zorral said:

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.

Makes me wonder if Bryan Fuller was up there scouting while writing the early episodes (Hannibal mostly filmed in Toronto, despite being set in Baltimore), caught an ep, and thought it was a good idea.

I might see if I can find MM, then. Sounds quite appealing.

[Zorral]

Murdoch Mysteries is supposedly also broadcast here in the U.S. as Artful Detective on something called the Ovation network? channel?  I don't know anything more than that though.

But seven seasons stream from netflix, seasons 8 and 9 are available on dvd from netflix, and all of them, I think are available on Acorn, which is like $5 a month or thereabouts?

I watched the first episodes of the first season some years back from Netflix and for whatever reason, the charm and all around excellence entirely passed me by.  But on the recommendation of a friend I came back to it -- it helped that right about then Netflix offered 7 season streaming.  I was hooked.

 

[Iskaral Pust]

I only like dreams if they're handled very well.  

The cop-out "it was all a dream" is unacceptable, as are deus ex machina via dreams where a deceased friend or spirit guide gives the character some crucial knowledge they could not have otherwise known (subconscious memory retrieval is ok) unless a magical system based on dreams is central to the story, e.g. ASOIAF or WoT. 

It's possibly acceptable to use dreams as a psychological insight into a character but often poorly executed to the point of being annoying.  We all know that dreams have some inherent incongruity or unreality that make them recognizable as dreams but many authors struggle to capture that without excessively trippy and contrived scenes.  And those who scale back the trippy psychedelic excess often err to the other extreme where the dream is implausibly on the nose.

Gaiman's American Gods is an example where the dreaming is acceptably central to the story and also executed well enough to not be annoying. 

[The Glad King]

What about the Tower of Joy dream sequence? That was no doubt very important for the plot. 

[Darth Richard II]

Wasn't that more of a flashback?

[maarsen]

I always thought it was Ned having a bit of a hallucination, thereby becoming somewhat of an unreliable narrator.

[Iskaral Pust]

ToJ was a haunting memory/flashback tinged with grief and shock, not a dream.  Revisiting traumatic memories, especially while fevered and/or drugged with opiates, isn't really the same as writing a dream.  Although it would be weird if the author over-relied on long term memories replaying with perfect consistency in REM dreams. 

I'm not knowledgeable in this area but I think REM dreams draw on short term memory much more than long term memory, and they would rarely play out as a memory without being infected/infused from other sources from short term memory.  But this is not at all an area of expertise for me.  I know many screenplays rely on recurring dreams of long term memories as a signal of PTSD, but I suspect the convenience of combining PTSD, mental anguish and expository flash back is a big reason.