Dreaming is
the oldest form of storytelling. Have you ever wondered who is writing all those
stories in the dreamscape?
Characters
find themselves in impossible situations filled with danger and desire, they
struggle to achieve their goals, there are contradictions and stress points,
and everything serves the story . . .
Dreams are a
perilous land where anything can happen to anyone at any time. As Tolkien wrote
about the land of Faerie: we can experience the "satisfaction of primordial
human desires" or "the realisation, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder."[i]
Like the
land of Faerie, a dream exists in a landscape with an integrity of its own. A
door opens into another reality, desire is evoked, emotions are stirred, and the personal,
everyday sense of self encounters something other than normal, waking reality. A perfect start for writing fiction! And dreams also come with a cast of characters.
How can you
access the creative genius of dreams in waking life?
You can use
the following exercise[ii] to lead you to the
place where stories live. You can use it to find a starting point for a story,
to shift writer’s block, to listen to the inner muse . . .
1) Begin with a
dream motif, one element of the dream that catches your attention.
2) Draw a small
circle in the middle of a large piece of paper and write a word that describes
the dream motif in the circle.
3) Allow any
associations that you have to that word, anything that comes to mind (no
censoring). Write each association at the end of a line you draw out from the
central circle like spokes.
4) When you
have finished--or have at least 8 associative words--write one, long sentence
using all the associative words but not the first central word. Connect the
words using linking words (be, am, is, are, was, were, because, while etc.) to
form a sentence.
5) On a new
piece of paper, represent each word of the sentence as a picture. The pictures
can be very simple--stick figures or line drawings. They do not need to
represent the words for anyone else, just you. Draw the pictures in the same
sequence as the words.
6) Cover all
the previous work except the pictures.
7) Get up,
stretch, make a hot drink, do something else for a few minutes.
8) Return to
the pictures and imagine you are seeing them for the first time (like an
archaeologist reading an ancient language). Forget the previous steps of the
process and let the pictures suggest the story. Write it down.
9) Keep writing
. . .
[i]
JRR
Tolkien
(1965), “On Fairy-Stories.” In Tree and
Leaf, pp. 3-73. Houghton-Mifflin Company, Trade & Reference Division.
p.13-14.
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