Mary-Sue: Who is She?

How to Write Dreams and Flashbacks

For once, I couldn’t find any how-to guides that I liked so I could reference off of, so I’m on my own for this, otherwise this would probably be longer and probably be more organized.  This should actually tell you something: there are practically no definite rules on how to write dream or flashback sequences.  There are rules telling you not to write either of sequences, but screw that!  If the only reason that having dreams and flashbacks being barred in fiction because they aren’t well-written, then keep writing them and get better at it until you get the hang of it.  Telling someone not to do it at all because they suck at it is just telling them to give up before they try.  In some stories, dreams and flashbacks are important for different reasons.  

Dreams

There’s no possible way I can tell you the right or wrong way of writing dreams.  Some complain that it’s too life-like, but if it’s too psychedelically weird where whales are flying and the character can breathe lava, then it seems useless to the story.  The fact is that dreams can be all over the place from totally life-like to off-the-wall I-can’t-believe-I-dreamed-that-am-I-crazy weird.  

Some people dream of waking up, taking a shower, brushing their teeth, getting dressed and getting to their car repeatedly as if the CD was on loop before they actually woke up to do those exact same things.  My mom had that dream, and did that routine until she got into her car at 5:30 in the morning to realize that it was a Saturday so she didn’t have to wake up or go to work (she was mad).  When I was seven or eight I dreamed I got up and went to the bathroom, not realizing I was actually going in my bed.  

There are some who dream in full colors, some who dream in a limited palette, and some who dream in black and white.  I tend to dream in color, but they aren’t generally bright.  Most of the dreams I remember are of something in a horror movie kind of color palette, but I do get a few bright dreams (the bathroom light was bright).  One of my dreams in particular had a very limited color palette.  I—well, my arm—was black and white, I wasn’t in any place, it was just that everywhere was blue and fog-like, and I was holding my bloody left kidney, with and artery still linking it to my body.

Like my kidney dream, some dreams don’t have a story or a rolling plot, and others do have stories, or story-like components.  Some story dreams run a complete reel from start to finish, and some have separate scenes to the same story.  I love these kinds of dreams because that’s where I get the strangest stories.  A few days ago I had two separate story-like dreams, both of which were more of the separate scenes category.  The first one was creepy as hell, so when I realized I was lucid dreaming, I forced myself to wake up, and when I fell back to sleep, I had another completely different story-like dream.  

Lucid dreaming is when you’re asleep, dreaming, but you realize you’re dreaming.  Some people continue to watch the dream at the pace, some can fast forward especially if they know they’re going to wake up soon, some can face the monster and ask it “What’s your name?”, and some people force themselves to either change the dream completely or wake up if they don’t like it.

The first dream, which I titled “Asusa”, takes place in a Japanese setting and “I” was a half Japanese and half German boy who just moved to Japan.  I moved into the house and there was a welcome party with lots of parents and lots of children (while I was somewhere between thirteen and seventeen).  During the party, all the babies, toddlers, and little kids were sitting in a group, and their parents were trying to get them to watch a show, but they kept looking up the stairs.  When I looked, I couldn’t see anything, but when I looked behind them I saw a girl.  She was a friend and was supposed to be there.  When I looked back at the parents for a split second, and looked back at the girl, there was another girl in shadows next to her and startled me.  The other girl wasn’t supposed to be there.  Then these beetles kept making an appearance, hollowing out bananas, leaving the peels perfectly intact.  I don’t know why that’s even relevant—the hollowing out bananas part, not the beetles.  In the next scene, I’m in my room and I look out my window to see the girl hanging by her neck looking at me.  She mouthed the words “Come outside.”  I sneak out to see a black cat.  When I look away and look back there are several smaller black cats in its place.  I find the girl with the noose hanging loosely around her neck sitting on Olivia’s, my “mother’s”, headstone.  We talk, and I find out her name is “Asusa”.  I told her I would help her somehow and we shake hands, but when I talk about the beetles, her rope gets yanked over the fence right behind the gravestone so hard she gets decapitated.  I hop over the fence and tear the rope off of where it’s hooked, and when she’s freed, an eye—not hers—looks at me through the fence.  When Asusa recovers she cries that the beetles were her brothers.  And that’s when I woke up.