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The Dream Sequence

Among many groups of authors, there seems to be this weird fascination with dream sequences. Perhaps a lot of writers got their start writing by creating a journal where they jot down their dreams. Perhaps a lot of authors favorite stories often contained dream sequences themselves. One of my favorite series, for example, called Wheel of Time, is so fascinated with dream sequences that later novels actually turned the dreams into an actual world, where a large portion of the story, characters, and battles actually took place. There were entire plotlines dedicated to it.

Few people seem to be able to get through a fantasy without creating some kind of dream sequence. Either some prophet has a dream, such as the prophecy of the coming of a great hero, or someone suddenly has bad dreams convinced something bad is coming. If, as a writer, you really have your crap together, you might even have a dream full of symbolism that flat out explains your entire story. Like Shaun of the Dead's bar scene, you lay out the entire plot of the story in a single chapter, even though that plot won't make a lick of sense to your readers at the moment.

In my last chapter, I was discussing a concept called reader's fatigue. In it, I used dreams as an example of something that often comes off as exhausting to readers. This is because dreams, in very nature, are a bit nonsensical. Even when they pertain to a person's psyche or personality, they can be a very long-winded and roundabout way to say something about somebody. I've mentioned in the past that the longer you take to say something, the more likely you are to bore your audience. Well, dreams happen to be a way of achieving a typically small goal in the maximum number of words possible. Not only do dreams take a really long time to say something, what they actually say is very hard to figure out and subject to interpretation.

Part of that is because most people reading your book do not understand your intent. Dreams can have a lot of different purposes. In Wheel of Time, they were an actual place where your enemies could show up and even touch you. However, in most stories, they could be trying to do characterization, or they could be trying to show the future, or they could be trying to show character development, they could be trying to give you an emotional moment, or they could just be there to fill up words.

Part of me feels the last option is the reason a lot of people lean on dream sequences. It gets an extra chapter out of the story without actually having to progress the plot a lick. But that's a problem too. When the plot isn't progressing, then the people reading the story have no reason to be reading it. And when we don't know what your intention is with a dream sequence, whether it's to help you understand the MC a little better or to help foreshadow what's to come, it's something shrouded in vagueness that is very difficult to cope with.

I think the most common use for dreams seems to be the foreshadowing part. This is kind of a problem, because it's freaking ridiculous when you think about it. Basically, whether you're writing a fantasy story, or a romance... you're giving the character who has the dream a superpower. That might work in the fantasy setting, but when you're writing a story with realife people, it's kind of silly when you think about it. If your character is having dreams that reveal plot points in the future, then basically you're writing a character who can see into the future.

Now, I'm sure there are some authors out there who actually believe in real life psychics and are convinced that there are tons of prescient people out there who just don't realize it, but for the rest of us, this is kind of a silly thing to give a character in your story, isn't it? Because when it's put in a story, it's not just a chance occurrence, it truly is prescience being provided by you, the author and ultimate god of your story. We typically like to believe as readers that as an author your only writing the parts that are important for us to know, and wouldn't be making use read things that aren't relevant to the plot. So when we read a dream sequence, we're already been told it's important because you're taking time to detail it, where "I had weird dreams last night" could have just as easily fulfilled the role.

And I truly do hope your dreams contain symbolism and foreshadowing, because the alternative is that they don't. In which case, why the hell did I just waste ten minutes reading through a dream that will ultimately not affect the story in the slightest? When you put a dream in to your story, either you're giving your MC an inexplicable superpower, or you're just wasting everyone's time.

One of the most fundamental issues with the "psychic dream", is that it's far more interesting for the writer than the reader. You see, what you as a writer forgets when you write this scene is that your reader hasn't read the rest of the book yet. To you, it's clever symbolism, but to your reader, it's literally meaningless. It's telling the future of the story, but without any context. If your story turns out to be super popular, and commonly gets read and reread, this might not be a bad thing, but when it comes down to most readers who will only read through a story once, this sort of vague foreshadowing will never stick. They won't remember it when it comes up in the story. They might as well be reading garbage for all the good it will do them later on.

Now, there is always the fakeout dreams. Something embarrassing happens, or if it's a horror, something scary. Watching character suddenly act out of character or reading fearfully as your favorite character is mauled by the serial killer, only to go... oops, it was a dreams all along! Psych! When dreams are used this way, they feel like a bad joke. They're there to illicit a cheap emotional reaction requiring a long set up, with usually a very quick and solitary payoff. Since "it was all a dream", they add nothing to a story. They sacrifice plot for a quick and cheap emotional scene. In essence, they are to stories like the jumpscare games are to video game horror. Cheap, easy, and without substance.

So, giving what I just said about dreams, you probably are thinking that I'm against dreams. Following the line, this would normally be the point where I explain why I don't think dreams are shit and why they also have their place in stories, but I'm actually having trouble coming up with any good reasons. So yeah, I guess I'm kind of against dreams here.

edit: I'm not always right when I write things, and I feel this was a place where I dropped the ball. I missed one good reason to have dreams. That is... characterization. Dreams can be a chance to look at how a character truly thinks. You can expose their desires, their fears, and their goals, sometimes revealing things about them that they might not even admit themselves when in their own Point of View. I will say I don't see dreams used this way often, but if I were to write this chapter today instead of whenever I wrote it, I'd probably be a bit more forgiving with this caveat. 

Like prologues, dream sequences are just something way overused in literature. They add little to a story except word count. Okay, I've sometimes seen them used for pacing. If you have a big scene, and you want your reader to wind down for a bit yet can't come up with a better way that fits into the plot, tossing in a dream sequence gets a mellow 2000 words of minutia to spread apart your last plot important scene over to your next plot important scene, giving the reader time to digest the important parts.

However, I really can't see this as a good thing. Dream sequences are lazy foreshadowing, lazy pacing tools, and lazy ways to increase word counts! As far as providing insight into the main character, I'd like to think you managed to do that throughout the entire story, what with you following their PoV and all.

There are places and reasons for dreams. Wheel of Time wouldn't have been the novel it was without the World of Dreams, and I'm sure there are some novels that have benefited from this overused cliché. However, the next time you feel the need to drop a dream sequence, please think about why you feel you need it. Did you want to drop some foreshadowing? I bet there are better ways to do it. Did you want to show readers the characters feelings? Still, better ways to do it. To pace out a scene? I'm telling you, there are better ways!

You may have read a dream sequence you just loved. You may have every intention of continuing to use them yourself. However, to repeat my mantra for this book, there should always be a reason behind it. Once you can come up with the reason and be able to argue for its right to exist, then you can start using it. Before that, you might want to step back on the dreams a bit. They induce reader's fatigue and can cause you to lose readers, especially when shoved into your story early on.