Capturing Emotions from Dreams
How your Nightly Thoughts can Help you Write Emotionally
The emotions you experience in the privacy of your dreams can help you write vivid emotional scenes for your fiction characters.
Nearly everyone experiences dreams, or more precisely, nearly everyone remembers their dreams at least occasionally. They could be funny or scary, a form of deja vu or simply a random combination of events from throughout the day. Did you know they can help you with your writing?
Most dreams invoke an extreme sense of emotion. For many this could be extreme fear or panic, such as in a nightmare. It could be grief and sorrow of remembering a lost loved one. It could be humor or confusion at the strange events unfolding in your mind. You might even experience apathy at its best (worst?) as you play the part of a completely uninterested bystander. No matter what the emotion, you can use this in your writing.
When you wake up in the morning and remember your dreams, write them down. Even if the plot doesn't interest you, be sure to capture the emotion.
- How did you feel? What emotions did you experience? Did they seem appropriate for the events, or were they out of place?
- Did you get a visceral, or physical, reaction to that emotion, such as sweating, tears, clenched fists, or waking up from falling out of bed?
- How did it change your state of mind? Has it reminded you of something you might dwell on throughout the day that you otherwise wouldn't have thought of?
- How willing were you to try new things, if that was an option? Did you willingly fly down the hallway or confront your monster?
- Did you experience other colors, sensations, or epiphanies?
Remember as you're answering these questions that there are no wrong feelings, even if what you experienced seems out of place or even morally wrong. Someone who has lost a loved one might feel joy in a dream, rather than sorrow, that their loved one is no longer a burden or suffering. This is just one example of a completely normal and more taboo reaction to a situation that could bring a lot of reality to your writing.
Refer to your dream journal when you need to inject strong emotion into your writing. Even if the situation isn't the same, you can use the reactions you remember and the notes from your journal to write emotionally charged scenes. Close your eyes and imagine that emotion with the events of your characters, and allow your readers to feel that through your writing.
Writing emotion can be a challenge. If you're not feeling it at the time, especially extreme and out-of-place emotions can come across as flat and uneventful. Capturing emotions in your dream journal is one way to create vivid and realistic scenes for your characters.
