Kevin's Watch

I have started a few different stories, the longest being 70 pages, I have the vague ideas but cannot do them justice with any coherent flowing descriptions, I have thought of developing a skill called lucid dreaming and creating my worlds in the dream, therefore I could write from personel experience about places impossible to visit.
Hs anybody else tried this method?
Peter

I regularly, though rarely, have lucid dreams, but never had any luck with the methods of teaching yourself to have them on purpose/at will. That could just be my lack of actual practice/commitment/discipline.
I'd love to hear about your results if you successfully carry out the plan, though.

I don't understand how this would help writing a book. There's nothing you can do in a lucid dream which you can't do merely by daydreaming, especially at the conceptual/thematic level. Sure, images might be more vivid in the lucid dream. But it's still your own imagination controlling it. I'd recommend concentrating more on words/character/motivation/plot than mental images. Unless you're going to shoot a movie, visualization isn't very useful. I don't think most authors work off of mental images. They start with words, and the words evoke mental images--well, sometimes, and not very clearly. Donaldson has expressed many times how he's not a visual writer, and I've heard readers express surprise at this revelation, because they seem to think they visualize his world in extreme detail. But I have my doubts. I think people confuse emotional content with visual detail. Just because you can "imagine" something you've read doesn't mean you're actually visualizing it. The process is very different ... like the difference between day dreaming and actual dreaming. I think most of us over-estimate our powers of visualization.

I've read a couple good books on the subject of lucid dreaming. There are techniques you can practice while awake to help increase the likelihood of having a lucid dream. The biggest problem is remembering it. Most of our dreams we forget upon waking. Even lucid dreams.

I've had several lucid dreams, worked off and on at having them regularly with limited success (mostly because I'm a slacker), and I agree with Z. Trying to become a better writer by learning to lucid dream is about as useful as trying to become a better chef by learning chemistry. Sure, they're loosely related, but they're mostly so different that you'd be better served by honing your primary craft.

But, to propose an experiment, try two different things every day. Every morning right when you wake up, spend 20 minutes writing about what you dreamed. Every night before you go to bed, spend 20 minutes writing about what you want to dream. They're both techniques for lucid dreaming, but I have the feeling that the actual writing will do more for your creative ambitions than the dreaming will.

Depends on what you want to focus writing about. You might be able to feel the emotional struggles of whatever it is you are experiencing, but there's still a physical element also. I'd use a combination of lucid dreaming and reading the accounts of people who have done something similar (i.e. dreaming about climbing a mountain might give you the experience of vertigo, but you're not going to experience the physical struggle in a dream).

Though our dreams may be fascinating to us personally, they're usually pretty boring to everyone else. Just try telling your dreams to someone and watch their eyes glaze over. Dreams aren't stories. I certainly wouldn't want to read someone's dream journal, not even Tolkien's or Donaldson's. I'd rather read things that develop naturally from people's experience with the real world--even in fantasy, you have to write what you know. You have to tap into what it means to be human. While the act of dreaming--as an experiential possibility--is part of being human, the specific content of dreams is usually just random noise. Even lucid dreaming, when you control over your actions within the dream, you're still reacting to an environment which you don't consciously create, to a large extent. To be able to control every detail of the dream is quite a challenge. It's so much easier to control the content of a story.

That's not to say that writing is effortless, of course. It's just that the challenge of invention is easier, in my opinion, than controlling a dream.

Whenever I find that I'm having trouble imagining a scene that I'm writing, it's usually because I don't know what the characters want in that particular moment. If you know what motivates them, their own priorities will guide you. If a particular detail isn't important to any particular character, there's not much point in putting it in the story. Your job as an author is not to be a tour guide. It's to bring your characters to life, and tell their stories. This simultaneously alleviates the need to invent pointless, "world-building" detail, guiding you to the details that you do need, as well as creates opportunities for characterization and character development when you otherwise would have just had exposition.

Though our dreams may be fascinating to us personally, they're usually pretty boring to everyone else. Just try telling your dreams to someone and watch their eyes glaze over. Dreams aren't stories.

Though it's an aside, I disagree; I've heard many people tell me stories about their dreams I found entertaining and enjoyable. I'm not rating them with grade A literature, but as anecdotes they are very pleasuring to be told of.

(I am also reminded of the story in Reave the Just where the Prince of a nation becomes obsessed with his dreams. "I have no wish to become a tyrant!")

Zarathustra wrote:Though our dreams may be fascinating to us personally, they're usually pretty boring to everyone else. Just try telling your dreams to someone and watch their eyes glaze over.

Amen. I hate hearing about people's dreams.

--A

Avatar wrote:

Zarathustra wrote:Though our dreams may be fascinating to us personally, they're usually pretty boring to everyone else. Just try telling your dreams to someone and watch their eyes glaze over.

Amen. I hate hearing about people's dreams.

--A

Heh...in general, I only tell peeps about my dreams if they get stuck in my head like a crappy song, and I have to get them out somehow OR [like the one I posted a while ago that had Cail in it] they have something to do with person/events relating to waking world.
Heh...I'm better at keeping my dream telling on topic than my post writing, it seems.
AND I try to tell as briefly as possible.
Probably cuz many dreams are actually more boring than vacation slide-shows when you really get them out in the light.

Hahaha, at least having them in a thread gives me the opportunity to ignore them. It's when somebody starts describing it in interminable, but vague, detail and you can't get away...

--A

Zarathustra wrote:Though our dreams may be fascinating to us personally, they're usually pretty boring to everyone else. Just try telling your dreams to someone and watch their eyes glaze over. Dreams aren't stories. .

actually, i've had several lucid and pretty interesting serial killer dreams that, for my money, were pretty good stories. it just creeps me out too much to write em down so i haven't. besides, there was something a bit too lucid (real) about them...they didn't feel like imaginative fodder at all. serial killer stories are only entertaining when you're not actually in them, if ya know what i mean. i used to practice (or try practicing) lucid dreaming. i stopped doing the little exercises (looking for my hand, shit like that) after the 3rd serial killer dream. (and had 2 more any way)

none for a while (several years) now tho. i still do have lucid dreams every now and then but most usually they're too fragmented to make stories out of.
they sometimes make me write pomes tho. (no serial killer pomes)

Lucimay wrote:it just creeps me out too much to write em down so i haven't

Isn't it odd that there is nothing that scares us more than to die in a uncommon way? It is almost as if there is an inverse correlation between the propensity of any given death, and our fear of it. After all, dead is dead.

Hahaha, it's not the being dead, its how you get there. Quick and painless beats slow and tortured any time.

--A

Oh absolutely! But a lot of the deaths that we really fear, are really quite quick.