How many people had pieces inspired by a dream?

[robinlxs]

I’ll share my story.
In 2005, I had a recurring dream about a feral little boy hiding in the trees of a forest. He hung around in my head for a couple of weeks, and didn’t climb down until a little girl appeared, and he followed her around like a love struck puppy. This dream inspired a short story. It was the last thing I wrote before taking 7 year hiatus. Fast forward to 2012, I’m in India, and Nepal. When I get back home I start writing all my ideas down furiously. My WIP is born, partly inspired by my short story. It’s taken 7 years to finish, and hopefully it will become a series (I’ve almost finished the first draft of the second book.) Most of that was teaching myself to write, but I didn’t have that dream way back when, I wouldn’t have started this journey.

 

[CupofJoe]

A lot of my imagery comes from dreams. Sometimes just your regular dreams but I have tried lucid dreaming but I find that gives me what I want from the dream and maybe not what a dream wanted to show me.

 

[Protocol Orin]

My inspiration comes from the nightmare that is my mind, but that's another story

 

[Esudeath]

My whole world came from these two boys I had a dream about. Although their setting seemed like feudal japan I changed a lot to meet other needs

 

[Protocol Orin]

I would say that the character I formed most from me has a part of his story that was like my mental state in a group of nightmares I had as a young child, with the same theme, or monster. The Groke (Specifically from the Moomin series), mostly in the very dark night. Completely still, but scarily fast and aggressive when you looked at her(?), screaming like an old, fast, muffled and distorted war siren, with its only aim to head on the straightest road towards you (even if it was a long way around something, which was even scarier, due to the tension of inevitability) and likely kill you.

The character was once innocent and ignorant like a child, always afraid of others, as if they would kill or hurt him (due to being cruelly ostracized, by looking way off, even a bit like a monster) for longer than a humans lifespan (He is very, very, long-lived). Not even having a understanding of death or proper care, leaving him trying to carry and take care of his dead child, long enough for the body to start braking down.
(A mix of real events, overfed a fish when I was young, and I have carried a dying big pet bird, but that was just a few years ago)

And the main story is about him becoming a bit of the opposite, or a necessary monster in his own eyes, while breaking, shaping and regaining some strong values, just by living to long in a recurring set of ages.

 

[Sheilawisz]

There are many story scenes of mine that were inspired by my dreams.

I still have to imagine and write an entire novel based on a single dream, with the Catalina Dream as my first candidate, but I am working on other stories at the moment. In my experience, there are few dreams powerful enough to inspire an entire novel... but they are real, this stuff actually happens and I love super intense dreams like that.

Sometimes it's the setting, other times it's just the characters... but some dreams can give you the full novel, believe me!

 

[ClearDragon]

Years ago I had a terrifying nightmare about the end of the world being caused by a bunch of supernatural events: An unstoppable disease that melts life forms, a super earthquake that did damage across the whole world at once, and massive dragons fighting each other!
I'm planning to someday write a whole book based on it.

 

[skip.knox]

I barely remember any of my dreams. Usually it's nothing at all; sometimes it's just a wisp of emotion that trails away, irrecoverable. When I do remember something more vividly, it's usually fragmentary and rather pedestrian--places I've been to, or places I've never seen but feel like I'd been to.

My wife, otoh, dreams whole stories. It's quite foreign to me, like living with someone fluent in another language I'll never know. I'm okay with that. I'd rather be awake for my stories.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Actually the story I'm just polishing off at the moment is about the exact opposite. I don't dream, or at least I don't remember my dreams. But a long time ago I read Simak's "Time is the simplest thing" and somehow managed to put the pretext of that - lucid dreaming / astral travel as a real life exploration of the universe - together with the idea of dreams and nightmares. That often enough people who endure night terrors etc, are actually astral traveling and terrified by what they see. It's not so much that aliens are terrifying, it's that they are so "alien" that people simply can't look at them without suffering some sort of emotional breakdown. And the only people who can really face them are travelers who see them in their dreams regularly and so have adjusted to the weird and incomprehensible.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Protocol Orin]

I was going to reply to the post above, but judging that I'm a bit drunk and would probably post something cringy, I'll spare myself the shame (And no I don't have the self-awareness to understand the hypocrisy of this comment)

 

[The Dark One]

My most successful novel was inspired by a fairly bizarre - not so much dream, but a dream situation. I can't explain it really as just to explain gives too much insight. No-one (as far as I know) has ever guessed the multiple twisty outcome.

Funnily enough, my next book also was partly inspired by a dream I had many years ago when I was (a) at uni, and (b) still a smoker. I woke in the wee hours from an incredibly detailed and atmospheric dream about an alien who comes to a mega-metropolis on earth and knocks on a door. The door is opened by the only other (secretly) member of his race on earth, for whom he has been searching. There was a lot more detail than that and I woke up knowing I had the beginnings of an incredible story.

Thing is, I was still a smoker in those days and when I went out to my table to start writing down the dream, I looked in my cigarette packet and was horrified to see there were only two left. There was no way I could write down the dream story with just two cigarettes so, like an idiot, jumped into my car and drove three kilometres to the all night servo.

By the time I got back, my dream brain had changed and I could no longer remember more than just a shell of the story.

On reflection, that's a microcosm of my entire life.

 

[Bluemoon]

In all honesty I'm not sure if one of my stories originated as a dream, or if I was simply so obsessed with it that I started dreaming about it.

 

[The StoryWeaver]

One dream (well nightmare) that I had will be the basis for a horror/mystery story.

A few other dreams have been noted down and add to the ideas folder - as elements of them may be something that I can use.

 

[Yora]

Today I came across a recommendation to write down your interesting dreams as a source of ideas. You see those pretty frequently.
And I just realized that I think I never had any interesting dreams in which anything happens that in some way would be interesting to explore in a story. I once dreamed of a shapeshifting creature that turned into my cousin so I would open the door and then I killed it when it turned into a parrot, but that's the most fantastic thing I ever remembered from a dream and it doesn't inspire me in any way.

 

[Zander Willmore]

I had a dram the other day about a prince in disguise on a pirate ship. This dream turned into a short story idea. But before I could write the short story I had ideas on how to expand it. So now It has turned into a novel. I am going to work on notes and chapter outlines when I finish some other projects I am working on.

 

[Artemis_Foo]

The book I'm trying to write came from a dream, from way back in 2006 or 7. It had such an impact on me I had to write it down, over the years, however, the story has warped and changed and is something completely different, but I like to think the feeling is still there.

 

[James Wilson]

The monsters in my book Fortunes Rising came from a dream I had in 2005. I woke up shivering and wrote descriptions and sketched them quickly. They were all a bit Lovecraftian, and let me assure you that a dream where you don’t realize it’s a dream those kind of monsters are SCARY! I tried to make them as scary in the book but it’s a hard task. Sheesh just thinking about that dream is creeping me out. A lot of my stories or elements of them come from dreams, some quite nice. It’s mainly because I remember dreams very often. I used to try to keep a dream journal but it’s more work than it’s worth, there are so many.

 

[LadyErynn]

I have a flash fiction inspired by a dream. It's a noir-type story with a supernatural/horror twist, and I wrote it with as much detail as I could remember.

 

[Luís Santana]

Three short stories.

1. THE NINE DIRECTIONS
2. ARE YOU BLIND OR WHAT?
3. JORGINHO

 

[The Dark One]

My most successful novel was inspired by a fairly bizarre - not so much dream, but a dream situation. I can't explain it really as just to explain gives too much insight. No-one (as far as I know) has ever guessed the multiple twisty outcome.

Funnily enough, my next book also was partly inspired by a dream I had many years ago when I was (a) at uni, and (b) still a smoker. I woke in the wee hours from an incredibly detailed and atmospheric dream about an alien who comes to a mega-metropolis on earth and knocks on a door. The door is opened by the only other (secretly) member of his race on earth, for whom he has been searching. There was a lot more detail than that and I woke up knowing I had the beginnings of an incredible story.

Thing is, I was still a smoker in those days and when I went out to my table to start writing down the dream, I looked in my cigarette packet and was horrified to see there were only two left. There was no way I could write down the dream story with just two cigarettes so, like an idiot, jumped into my car and drove three kilometres to the all night servo.

By the time I got back, my dream brain had changed and I could no longer remember more than just a shell of the story.

On reflection, that's a microcosm of my entire life.

Happy to report that this book has just been published. It's been available for a week and is already getting some fantastic reviews.

It's only taken 30 years, but the dream shards I always recalled were the impetus for writing the story.