From January 17, 2015
The other night, I dreamed I was in a Wagon Train episode–in black-and-white, no less. I always dream in color, so the B&W was a nice touch of authenticity.
In this episode, there were two women with the wagon train, twin sisters, who seemed to know much better and easier routes than the train had ever used before, and everyone was happy to go where the sisters directed. But then along came the scout, Flint McCullough (Robert Horton–same as in the TV show), with horrifying news: the sisters were leading us into a trap.
As he denounced them, they lost their temper–and lost the power to keep up a facade of being human. The illusion dissipated, and they stood revealed as non-human creatures with faces like the faces carved on totem poles. Their plan was to lead the train to a place where a mob of their kind waited to ambush the train and kill and eat the people.
At that point my wife said something and I jumped a foot into the air, and of course woke up.
Anyway, pilgrims, if you want to write fantasy, learn to use your dreams. Sometimes the sleeping mind comes up with much wilder stuff than the waking mind. I know I’m going to use this Wagon Train dream somewhere in my writing. I mean, it’s just gotta mean something when trusted guides turn out to be carnivorous monsters.
Famous fantasy writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long used their dreams in their writing. In fact, Long used one of Lovecraft’s dreams as the basis for his gloriously scary short novel, The Horror From the Hills. As for me, dreams gave me the opening scenes in Bell Mountain, when Jack hears the mountain singing, and The Last Banquet–that dream gave me Gurun as a character and showed me how she came to Obann.
You, too, can use this dynamic technique of fantasy-writing. Just send $5.50 to–uh, I mean, learn to pay attention to your dreams: especially the funky ones. Someday a dream might give you the start of a pretty good book.
Laughed at the part about sending money. Good points about the usefulness of dreams!
The night following one of the saddest days of my life, I had a dream and in that dream I heard a song playing on the radio. It woke me up, and I hurriedly played what I had heard on guitar, recording it into my iPad. The next morning I fleshed it out and had a fairly good piece of light classical music, think along the lines of something you’d hear the Boston Pops play. Dreams can be amazing.
It was good you were able to record it.
An iPad can do simple audio recordings, which comes in very handy.