Advice on how to write a convincing dreamworld

Some background:

My current book is a surreal fantasy, set mostly in the world of actual dreams. It can be reached via various wormholes in the waking world, and when someone vanishes into one it's called "slipping sideways." The heroes are a group of misfits on a hovering train who try to help anyone who slips sideways, while fighting an evil corporation trying to exploit the dreamscape for their own ends. Plotwise, not trying to reinvent the wheel.

The advice I'm looking for is, how does one capture that dream feeling? You know the one, where you're right in the middle of walking naked in a crowd or leave a movie theater and find yourself in a church where everyone is weeping. Everything feels so strange but you just go with the flow. I want to get that feeling on the page in a minimalist style, rather than relying on the usual fantasy tropes.

Any advice and recommended works are welcome. I am a student of David Lynch, and currently watching Legion, which has the kind of vibe I'm looking for.

Also, feel free to post some of your favorite dreams, especially ones that follow some kind of narrative. I have one set under Venice I'll share later :)

I can't speak for everyone, but my dreams tend to follow specific patterns. I'll go back to the job I quit in September, or try and go to school despite graduating four years ago, and in both cases I'll be absolutely stressed and lost. I'll go to a place I'm familiar with and it'll be a completely different layout, such as a massive misty indoor jungle or a combination of multiple places put together, or my middle school that somehow has a gaping chasm in the middle that everyone just accepts as normal. I'll be going for vacation with nothing packed, not even wearing shoes, and resign myself to knowing I'm going to be wearing the same clothes every day for a week. I'll jump off a ledge and hover jump across an entire ocean, only to fall in when I try and replicate it a second time. Or I'll just be unable to move or speak or sometimes even see when sleep paralysis takes over.

I think the point of all of this is that to write a convincing dreamworld, you should draw from your own dream patterns and embrace the surreality, the subconscious brain stuff, the settings and locations that tend to pop up, and even the moments where things just suck and you're struggling because you're not actually awake.

Thank you, that sounds good. And man your dreams get epic :)

First, some more research material to look at:

• Inception deals directly with infiltrating and manipulating dreams.
• Everything by Satoshi Kon is about the line between dreams and reality (plus this video essay helps too).

I have two pieces of advice.

First, embrace tunnel vision. Often in my dreams, if I'm not actively thinking about something it doesn't exist. If I am focused on something, it's the only important thing at the moment. Obviously once something is established in the dream it could come back in a weird way (or out of left field) and you should embrace that too. It's a very different way of thinking about setup-and-payoff, but there's a lot you can get out of this framework.

Once you've got that mechanic down, think of the story progression in terms of "therefore" and "but".

For example: Alice is performing on stage, but she has stage fright. Therefore, she imagines the audience in their underwear and so now the audience exists entirely in their underwear. But Alice sucks as a singer. Therefore, the audience starts chasing her. Therefore, she runs away (the theater doesn't exist anymore, it's just a dark void now). But she comes across a gaping chasm. There isn't a bridge, so she has to jump over it instead. She jumps and starts flying. The dark void turns into blue skies and the clouds rush below her. But then she thinks, "Huh. Why am I flying?" and so she falls out of the sky. Her fall gets broken by a trampoline shaped like a pair of underwear. Continue as needed.

I hope this helps!

It definitely does. Inception is a favorite, but the dreams in that one feel... strangely linear. Tenet has more of the vibe I'm going for, with the disjointed narrative and surreal combat. I do need to embrace the abstract and the random more, just want to do it while maintaining a narrative flow.

It's definitely hard to translate the chaos of dreams into a narrative just because you either end up going so far that the work becomes a Mind Screw or they stick to basic dream tropes and don't fully embrace what a dream feels like. But, like I said, I think a good way to do it is to draw from your own dreams and embrace dream logic.

One thing you might be able to sprinkle in are dream symbols. Websites like Dreammoods have databases of what certain imagery and events might mean for the person dreaming, and even if they're not real, you can go through the list to find things that represent specific concepts relevant to the story, characters, and theme. Like a Genius Bonus for people who like psychology and symbiology, while also adding to the chaos and confusion.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 15th 2022 at 6:47:57 AM

dream symbols and symbolism are a very good idea, I'll do research.

One distinction I'm trying to draw is that the main characters are observing and participating in dreams, but not dreaming themselves. So they (and the audience) are seeing events lucidly, and an understandable narrative emerges. Plus there's a clear distinction between the dreaming world and the waking world.

I'm also considering the notion of dreams as a city. Like, every dreamer creates a room or a street in one vast space, and similar dreamers subconsciously form neighborhoods and districts.

You might be interested in the Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker franchise. I haven't seen the show, but the books were pretty good, and the series focuses on a lucid dreamer who has to stop a nightmare monster from breaking out into the waking world.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 15th 2022 at 7:40:04 AM

I'll give it a try, the cover art is gorgeous.

Edited by Jadabunz on Jan 15th 2022 at 10:02:22 AM

Also, you should also consider if the presence of "Sealed Rooms" exists in this Dream World of yours.

(Basically, dreams that are not shared by the collective, they are still there, of course, but locked away so the dreamer doesn't have their dream invaded by anyone else outside the spectrum of its own dream.)

Like having an apartment building with its front doors locked despite all of the apartments sharing the same space, so to speak.

This could also serve as an potential obstacle for the characters in-story, as they might need something from someone that inhabits a "Sealed Room"

an interesting notion. I'll see if it fits into the rewrite.

The city idea is fairly new; the original concept is that all dreams jumble together into an impossible-to-map space. The only way to navigate is through a series of wormholes that lead through Hammerspace itself (one of my favorite tropes, and in this case made of raw unconstructed dream matter, like a place where its an endless Category 5 hurricane).

Another thing to consider.

How are nightmares being manifested and handled in this dream world?

Separate hellscapes or as raging kaiju?

Something a little more subtle (though kaiju is an interesting way to go :)

The nightmare zone is like a warehouse district after dark: very grim, very liminal space where you feel like you're not supposed to be there. Various phobias are stored in the rooms and warehouses, and any creatures lurking there aren't inherently evil, more like automatons in a carnival haunted house.

i would make a game of it ; i'd get a couple of dice ( six-sided for simplicity's sake ) and assign to each number, from 2 to 12, a vehicle, a person, an object, a location, an event, and a creature - i'd keep in mind that i could take these things apart and recombine them as the dreamer's relevant memories, fears, emotions, expectations, and desires flow ~

i rarely have paranormal abilities in my dreams and extraordinary things rarely happen ; more often, my dreams are extremely realistic, but there is always a surreality to them that i can only recognized once i've woken up ~

Oh, another thing to keep in mind is that, statistically speaking, most people cannot read or tell time in their dreams. I actually can read in my dreams (it's apparently just a thing with writers), but a lot of audience members will probably relate to the protagonists picking up a book and seeing gibberish, or seeing the clock change every time they look at it.

YES, that's actually a bit of a plot point. The Society on the train use synchronized pocket watches to remind themselves of the time to keep on task.

A game is definitely something I would consider. My dreams tend to get pretty fantastical, and I had vivid nightmares as a kid. The worst one was getting chased around my childhood church by the Predator in bloody surgical scrubs; nothing Freudian about THAT.

Yeesh. My worst nightmare was about my bathtoys coming to life and chasing me around my house. I was five.

chasing is a recurring theme for most kids' bad dreams. Feeling of helplessness probably.

My worst nightmares... involves the "Grudge-Ghosts" (Yes, and no, it is and is not, the one from Ju-On)

The moment they appear in my dream, I do everything I can to assume direct control, and wake up immediately, hard-rebooting the dream-computer, and hope it won't be the same dream I return to when I go to sleep again moments later...

It works, most of the time.

And before that, it was the meat-monster from "Naked Space". (That one, was horrifying to share dream—space with, and I hadn't mastered the art of "Hard-Reboot" yet, so I had to run through rooms and close doors behind me in hope it would slow that thing down for a few seconds with each door... for an endless chase in an endless corridor full of doors.)

I ran like heck from that thing, because I knew it was going to eat me alive, piece by piece, if it caught me just once...

And I was in my teens when I first saw that movie by accident...

Edited by TitanJump on Jan 17th 2022 at 5:01:37 PM

All of that sounds utterly horrifying and I gotta say I'm here for it :)

Update:

In line with my love for minimalism, the world continues to shrink.

It's not a world, nor a city. It's a hotel. A hotel where everyone rents a room for the night and fills it with their mind. Every room is as big or as small as it needs to be, and dreamers wander the corridors and enter each other's minds and move on, changed.

That sounds awesome.

thank you :) I never felt really at ease as a writer until I learned to boil things down to simple, powerful descriptions.

I like that idea a lot, too.

Somewhat ironically, my dream tonight involved some place that according to me was a game I was playing, but in the actual dream itself I was experiencing it all, so, you know, still counts. It was this place with what I can only describe as being randomly generated rooms, which had the chance of leading you elsewhere, but could also come with a jump scare or something, and it supposedly took place inside of a tree, which... yeah. It reminds me of your hotel idea because of all the doors and rooms.

YES! You were a guest :)