The Temple of Dagon

From what I've read, some of Lovecraft's best writing was inspired by his nightmares.

Lately I've had a couple of really strange dreams that I've used to start a new story. Unfortunately, the dreams didn't give me anything past the beginning and now I'm stuck. I've tried to imagine what I would do in the same situation, but running away and hiding doesn't seem to be a very entertaining plot device...

So now I'm hoping that I'll have some more dreams that I can somehow twist into a continuing plot line. Unfortunately, now that my flu is clearing up, and my fever has broken, I doubt my dreams will be nearly as interesting.

Oh well, maybe I'll get lucky and contract some new disease soon...

Wish me luck

The guy I am writing a game for tells people the following:

"We call them nightmares; Andrew calls them research."

I used to always remember my dreams when I was younger.. but I rarely do any more. I am not sure why. Lucid dreams were a common occurrence for me back then..

As far as getting inspiration from them.. you could just deprive yourself of sleep, until you are in a dream-like state anyway But most doctors would recommend against that I think.

And I won't even go into other methods

If you want to remember your dreams, it helps to keep a notebook and pen by your bed. Just scribble down anything you can remember when you wake up. The more you do it, them more you'll remember.

I love that quote Andrew

Yeah me too...so did a friend of mine who is a senior producer for the BBC.

Usually, my dreams don't involve anything that could be remotely useful for my fiction (unless blowing up the moon with a rocket-propelled monkey launcher counts as horror). However, I do tend to daydream a lot, about dark and grotesque things, which can help. One particular vision, when I was about to doze off in a local coffee shop, consisting of a vast oceanscape pierced by a sinking ship, inpsired 'The Lure of the Kraken', while an image of a faceless crowd marching down the ame city street morphed into 'The Crowd - A Parable".

My dream was perfect, there was actually this weird thing menacing me and I was trying to dispel it with uncanny results. As I said earlier, however, it never went much past that.

Damn that fever for breaking...

That is a main body of my work Eric, writing from a lot of my nightmares and that is how my book I am working on in parts are coming to be. It is tricky stuff writing from the nightmares. I will post a link to my nightmare I wrote about on another thread but if you can get that down you got some strong stuff.

NickolausPacione wrote:That is a main body of my work Eric, writing from a lot of my nightmares and that is how my book I am working on in parts are coming to be. It is tricky stuff writing from the nightmares. I will post a link to my nightmare I wrote about on another thread but if you can get that down you got some strong stuff.

You should either take a lot of the emotions or descriptions that the nightmare evokes, and use them, or take the basic plotline or events from the nightmare as your framework - but don't attempt to replicate the dream entirely, it's folly. Stories written like that tend to be fool's gold, fool's gold, I tells ya.