From Dreams to the Page
Problems in translation
Let’s face it: most dreams are incomprehensible gibberish. They’re the defragmentation of the mind, reordering and mixing elements of our lives with the profound weirdness of our imaginations.
I love to dream. I’m especially fond of lucid dreaming, where you have this faint recognition that you’re in a dream. Some people have talked about being able to 'control' a dream, but in my experience, it’s more like pointing a sail in a certain direction and waiting for the wind.
Sometimes my dreams are very cinematic. I’ll be in the middle of one and something awesome will happen and I’ll think to myself — mid-dream, mind you — wow, this would make a wonderful story.
If the dream is really good, like the one I had last night, then I’ll occasionally wake up in the middle of the night in some half-hearted attempt to remember what I’m dreaming about. I don’t write this crap down, because I’d prefer to jump right back into lucid wonderland.
Then the morning arrives. The dream still has this tangible, mystical quality to it. But in reality it’s like cutting into an imaginary loaf of bread — all that remains is a poof of smoke that drifts up and gradually fades away.
The main problem is that dreams are unable to hold the weight of logical consistency. They don’t stand up to rigor, of character or setting. In other words, the fluidity of a dream is replaced by something that actually makes no sense.
This happens all the time, including this morning. I’ll not bore you with the nitty-gritty, other than to say it somehow involved two people in an underground cave, a life-saving blue planetary explosion (what?) that was seen from space, a companion dying or disappearing; then, the Russians came to cover it up. Suddenly, the ostensible “I” am on a train towards an unknown destination. End scene.
There was some really cool shit there. I woke up, as usual, excited to jot something down, only to realize once again that what works in a dream usually doesn’t work in fiction.
It’s a problem of translation. Artists like Salvador Dalí were able to create surrealistic dreamscapes because he worked with a visual medium. The eye can interpret incongruent elements and coerce them into a cohesive image. Cinema, I think, is less successful in this regard, because it too relies on storytelling. And storytelling relies on having a certain structure, much like language itself.
Rules can be bent, and even broken, but dreams don’t play by the rules of our woken lives. They flit and meander and mine the mundane for something twisted or cool. There’s nothing to tie everything together.
That hasn’t stopped other writers from trying. Some people might even enjoy reading them. I know of the French author, Georges Perec, who kept a dream diary, which was then published as La boutique obscure. Arthur Schnitzler wrote the appropriately titled Dream Story, but now we’re starting to veer into sexual fantasy, and that’s a slippery slope into the domain of Freud. Also, Dream Story was adapted into Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and that’s a whole other can of worms.
About ten years ago I had a dream of a plane crash. It was interesting because my mind could realistically produce the terrifying vertigo of the body plummeting to the earth. When I awoke, I drafted a short story.
Warning: it’s not very good. But, for the sake of proving my point, I’ll link to that garbage below.
I don’t have a real conclusion to this impromptu essay, so I’ll end by thanking you for reading.
