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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Jan 17, 2022 13:44:27 GMT
This one is a bit different from the norm on here.
in 1797 the great Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have dreamed his poem Kubla Khan after taking opium. He was up to line 54 when a "person from Porlock" interrupted him and the rest of the poem faded from his memory. it's a good story no matter what the truth.
But I'm sure several authors have based stories on dreams they had, though not word for word as Coleridge said he did. I'd think the horror/ghost genre lends itself to this mode of inspiration better than most.
Do you know any authors who claim to have written a story where elements of it came from dreams? Tell us the story and the background below.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 17, 2022 14:27:34 GMT
Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that a dream got him started on Jekyll & Hyde. This is what he says in "A Chapter On Dreams" (from Across The Plains, 1892) - "I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature... For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake..."
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Post by Shrink Proof on Jan 17, 2022 15:18:58 GMT
Michael Marshall Smith's "The Dark Land", which features in various collections, is IMHO the best literary description of what it's like to be dreaming. And unable to wake up...
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Post by samdawson on Jan 17, 2022 16:05:15 GMT
Do you know any authors who claim to have written a story where elements of it came from dreams? Tell us the story and the background below. Who's going to be first?
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Jan 17, 2022 16:11:27 GMT
Do you know any authors who claim to have written a story where elements of it came from dreams? Tell us the story and the background below. Who's going to be first? You are.
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Post by samdawson on Jan 17, 2022 18:17:22 GMT
I would have assumed all of us have put a pad or tape recorder by our beds after experiencing dreams so vivid that we felt sure they would make a story. I don't imagine I'm the only one to have woken to find a long meaningless mumble on the tape, or an illegible scrawl on the pad. It seems that what feels like a vivid and extraordinary dream usually provides no logical basis for its imagery. The single hardest-to-write story I've ever come up with was an attempt to commit to paper a nightmare set in a tube station that was coming round about once every six months. It featured an almost paralysing sense of terror tied to that location (I'd had similar dreams about other settings since childhood). Although I knew the why - it was based on a station where on the last tube of the night I'd gone to try and give first aid to someone crushed under a train - there was no real way to convey or explain the depth of the terror, especially as it was so dreamlike and irrational. I did my best but it was hard work to try and format and explain it all given the illusory and inherently illogical nature of such dreams. However, perhaps predictably, once I'd done so I was never troubled by the dream again.
Separately and much more recently, I found that one particular strong and prescription-only painkiller sometimes gives rather vivid dreams which can still be remembered in the morning, especially if you've had some drinks with it (which you're not meant to do, so Don't Do This At Home). Having learnt this, on the occasions where I've taken, it I sometimes tried to focus my mind on a story idea that was stuck or incomplete, in the hope of it resolving in a dream. It hasn't worked, but on one occasion it did give one very vivid image. It meant extra writing to incorporate it, but I think it made the story a better one. This was a one off, though, and I wouldn't recommend taking it in the hope of the subconscious offering a creative short cut.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Jan 17, 2022 19:59:27 GMT
"Sleep is a luxury they don't need, a sneak preview of death..."
("Beazley Street" - John Cooper Clarke)
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Post by Swan on Jan 17, 2022 23:54:00 GMT
Not literature, but there is the famous anecdote of KekulƩ having a day dream of the Ouroboros serpent devouring its own tail, which led to his discovery of the structure of benzene.
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