The Binge-Worthy Stories We Tell Ourselves Every Night but Rarely Remember

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember that the night-time soap opera, Dallas, once covered up a major plot shift by having a character (Pam) dream all the story covered in season 9 (Bobby’s death) because the actor was lured back to the show for season 10. It’s the ultimate example of the storytelling adage, “Dreams are Cheating,” meaning you can’t use a character’s dreams in the telling of a story because dreams don’t drive the consequences of real life.

The producers had their reasons, and in the genre of soap operas, it’s not even that big of a deal. Still, the move has been lampooned, and drives home the point that dreams are cheating.

That said, dreams are still useful for the storyteller, and I recommend you start paying attention to your dreams and writing them down.

Dreams are the mind’s attempt to make sense of whatever the heck is going on in your visual cortex while you sleep. I don’t understand the mechanics of that phenomenon, but I do understand your brain is drawing on the subconscious to interpret what it thinks it sees.

Moreover, the subconscious is telling you a story about what you think it sees, including the emotional impact of stories.

The main emotion of my dreams is shame. You know the type: arrived at school in your underwear, realize you have a test but haven’t studied, that sort of thing. I dreamed once I was dating someone I knew in real life, then remembered in the dream that I was married, and I had been cheating on my wife.

That’s a pretty decent lesson on storytelling, telling a compelling action sequence, followed by a revelation of the situation that makes the characters and the audience feel a serious emotion.

By paying attention, and writing down the dream, you’re given a chance to learn from your subconscious how to make people feel things during a story.

Also, have you ever noticed that dreams use a lot of smash cuts? One scene you’re walking around school in your underwear, the next you’re at the office and your dog has pooped in the boss’s office. There’s no explanation of how you got from school to work, or how much time has passed. There’s certainly no exposition dump about the dog as he takes a literal dump on the carpet. It just happens, and you accept it. We all do.

Our brains fill in the gaps when a story makes a wild smash cut. By writing down our dreams, we practice some efficient storytelling.

My early storytelling was dominated by transition scenes, thinking I needed to explain how everybody made their way from the family room to the kitchen when Mom called them to dinner. I accounted for the chairs, the food, and who put the dogs in the basement so that they could eat in peaces. It was a ridiculous amount of wasted time in the story.

When I started writing down my dreams, I grew comfortable with the leap of scenery in new scenes.

I also learned to focus on the business of each scene (what people do in the setting of the scene) and how to reveal the situation so that tension and emotion could be felt by the audience.

Finally, by paying attention to my dreams, I strengthened the connection between conscious and subconscious minds in my brain. I find I easier to write now as each scene in a story presents vividly in my mind and I’m mostly writing down what I see in me head. There are a lot of factors that contribute to my improved visualization, but writing down my dreams is definitely one of them.

If you want to try it out, it’s handy to keep a notebook near your bed, especially if you have a light on your night stand. Don’t forget the pen.

When writing down a dream in the middle of the night, don’t try to capture everything. Hit the high points and go back to sleep. Think about the dream again in the morning.

When you wake up with a dream, go ahead and get it all written down as best you can. If it becomes a reliable routine, you may see changes in your writing over the weeks and months. The efficient style of dream stories will infiltrate your own storytelling.

And you will have tapped into one of the best sources for stories and creative projects.