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Can dreams be turned into stories?

12/15/2018

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Last night I dreamed I was trapped.  I dreamed this three times and have already forgotten two of them, but the middle dream, the worst one, I can't forget.  I was in the most appalling awful building.  Raw concrete, windows of plastic-glass that could not be broken.  The view was desolate:  a wintry, industrial landscape of barbed wire and more concrete.  Others were with me, young men that looked familiar.  We were tasked to dig into the building.  I have no idea why other than that there was a huge back story to all of this I'd already forgotten in the dream itself.
But the floors were had to dig into had veins of radioactivity.  Terrified, I tried to escape by breaking the glass windows but my arm just bounced off them.  I ran through all the floors of the building until I found a broken elevator shaft and managed to climb down precarious debris to the outside.  The last bit was high but I jumped anyway, realising I could slide down on a curtain of fabric that was part of someone's stall at a Christmas market.  
It was all very jolly but I had to keep running.  The girl who ran the stall came with me, terrified too.  We ran and just when it seemed safe - we were out in the open - she turned to me and smiled, a friendly, kind sort of smile - and a cage snapped around both of us.
An ally had suddenly betrayed me.  The snap of the cage's appearance was like a silent explosion of invisible light, a change so sudden that I almost died with fright.
​It was a huge cage,  plenty of room for others.  And the others came:  rich, privileged people, all dressed in their best finery, all looking up with wonder.  I had seen these people before - at the market?  In another building?  Had they been watching us digging in the radioactive building?  At first they had just come to gawp at us in the cage but then they were trapped too, hundreds of them.
It seem were all there because someone.....

Well, who knows.  The next dream probably explained it all but I have no memory of it.

Listening to someone relating dreams is unutterably boring.  It makes fabulous sense to the person trying to describe it, I mean, you can still SEE the images so clearly.  You can FEEL the emotions (in my case, it's almost always terror or ineffectual rage).  You can see the colours, the people, the weirdness, all the laws of physics broken, the Alice in Wonderland effect in full force.  But in describing it, all is lost.  

I've turned many dreams into stories.  None of them, upon completion, resemble the dream in any way.  It's almost impossible to recreate the surreal events of a dream in a way that is interesting to others.  And you only have to witness what passes for dreams in movies or books to realise that you never dream like that.  So don't even try.

However, for inspiration, there can be no better source!
​
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