Weird Dream Warehouse

[JamesMiehoff]

How many of you get inspiration from waking up in the middle of the night from a weird dream and then feel compelled to write a story around it?

This has been happening a lot to me lately. I don't know if it's stress from the current situation or because they changed my meds a couple of months ago.

Not that these are necessarily my best writing, but certain dreams will recur until I lay them to rest by writing them.

I call this opening the weird dream warehouse, because that was what happened in one of the first of those dreams. I was walking with a dapper older gentlemen down a rustic dirt road chatting and suddenly we were in front of this large barn like structure. He put his hand on a large round door pull and invited me to join him, "In the Weird Dream Warehouse," as he opened the door.

I had this dream in various formats for about 5 nights in a row until I wrote the basics of it down as a story. I have written more to flesh that out as a story but I don't like the current state so I haven't uploaded it.

I recently uploaded another of the dreams, The Fire Orchid into Erotic Horror. Again, Not my best effort, but it stopped that dream.

So whether I am losing my mind is not the question, I am pretty sure I am. I would just like to know if I am a solitary traveler down this road or has anyone else taken the old man up on his offer and wandered into the Weird Dream Warehouse?

James

 

[NotWise]

So whether I am losing my mind is not the question, I am pretty sure I am. I would just like to know if I am a solitary traveler down this road or has anyone else taken the old man up on his offer and wandered into the Weird Dream Warehouse?

James

I don't find it as compelling as you do, but several of my stories from the last year are based on ideas or images that I woke with. Watch Me! was based on a dream about transcendent ballerina's. Her Dream House came from a short piece of a dream, and I built Working for Mom around an image of Sara that I woke up with and couldn't get rid of.

 

[lovecraft68]

I had a dream a couple nights ago where I was waiting for a hooker on Halloween night(I'm assuming my wife was out of town) and the agency cancels but the bell rings and there's this little hottie in her late teens dressed as a sexy witch and I offer her the money I would have paid the escort.

Its a theme I'm sure has been done, and who knows maybe I heard something like it once and it resurfaced in my dream, but I woke up hot and bothered and later that morning banged out about half the story.

 

[ElectricBlue]

... but I woke up hot and bothered and later that morning banged out about half the story.

"...later that morning..."

That's awfully discreet, old chap, very polite. I trust you shut the door, so as not to astonish the maid.

Lovecraft looked up from his coffee. "Well, it's better than, 'tugged one out,' don't you think?"

Indeed .

 

[ElectricBlue]

How many of you get inspiration from waking up in the middle of the night from a weird dream and then feel compelled to write a story around it?

Regularly. They end up being side projects that then get a life of their own, and run on. Thinking about it, I'd say half of mine start from a dream, or get dream imagery incorporated somewhere. My subconscious is a fabulous place.

 

[jaF0]

My dreams would terrify Stephen King.

 

[lovecraft68]

"...later that morning..."

That's awfully discreet, old chap, very polite. I trust you shut the door, so as not to astonish the maid.

Lovecraft looked up from his coffee. "Well, it's better than, 'tugged one out,' don't you think?"

Indeed .

I am a romantic after all.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I am a romantic after all.

You are indeed. With a knife... .

 

[RejectReality]

Yeah, horror and evil characters are the only thing my dreams have spawned.

The scene where Zoraster slowly, magically crushes his murderous stepmother, in which I describe the steadily larger bones cracking, and a final sputtering wheeze are all from a nightmare where one of my friends was stuck in a box crusher that was running.

Nightmares and utterly baffling/disturbing acid trips are all I have. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of neutral or positive dreams I can remember in my life. I get so little sleep now that I can't remember the last dream I could remember. It's been years.

Considering the standard slate, I don't miss it much.

 

[RetroFan]

On a similar note, has anyone ever had any dreams about the characters and events in one of your stories after you finished and published it?

I remember having a vivid dream about the characters in my Christmas 2018 story 'The Unsuitable Girlfriends' about six weeks after I published it. I could see and hear all of them as I wrote them, and could see the setting - a farm in South Australia - very clearly, even though it was all fictional.

 

[ElectricBlue]

On a similar note, has anyone ever had any dreams about the characters and events in one of your stories after you finished and published it?

I remember having a vivid dream about the characters in my Christmas 2018 story 'The Unsuitable Girlfriends' about six weeks after I published it. I could see and hear all of them as I wrote them, and could see the setting - a farm in South Australia - very clearly, even though it was all fictional.

Not afterwards, but while I was writing one of my Floating World stories. It was very strange, a fictional character appearing in a dream. She was hot, though .

 

[lovecraft68]

On a similar note, has anyone ever had any dreams about the characters and events in one of your stories after you finished and published it?

I remember having a vivid dream about the characters in my Christmas 2018 story 'The Unsuitable Girlfriends' about six weeks after I published it. I could see and hear all of them as I wrote them, and could see the setting - a farm in South Australia - very clearly, even though it was all fictional.

That happened to me last year. A character in my Abigail series, Nicole, black ops turned gun for hire femme fatale type

In her background I'd briefly mentioned her first sexual experience being a girl in High school, and it surprised both of them as neither realized they had those urges. I didn't do any type of detailed sex scene, just a few "images' in her mind as she thought back on it.

But a few nights later I dreamed the entire scene vividly, the dialogue, the seduction, the mixed lust and shame....I woke up thinking goddamn I should have written that!

 

[oggbashan]

I have a recurring dream about an imaginary town based on my own but with streets, businesses, shops and a seafront that don't exist in reality.

It is so consistent that I could almost draw a map of it. In my dreams, I often walk about it and meet the same people - again non-existent in reality - and interact with them. Fag-Ash Lil (from jeanne_d_artois' story Unatit) is around in the background but never a major character. The town is more like the 1950s than the 21st century but doesn't seem historic. One parade of shops I know is based on a secondary shopping centre in Hastings as it was in the early 1970s. The real place is nothing like that now and it never was exactly as I see it.

Sometimes I dream of characters in posted stories particularly Candice from my Silverbridge stories, Janet from Lavender, and Jean from Maid's Revolt. All three are based on an amalgam of real people but none would be recognisable by themselves or anyone else. But I liked the people that went to make up each character.

Other dreams sometimes translate into stories but never the townscape. It is a place to retreat to and just enjoy. A few times when around in the real town I expect the next street corner to lead to the imaginary town. It never does.

 

[gordo12]

Fido came from such a dream. I woke up around 4 am giggling. For the next hour and half I couldn't control myself from giggling, lying in bed in the dark while scene after scene played through my head. It's a weird experience. It was also a story that got 55 comments in LW that called it hilarious in some form or other. Only one negative comment telling me I had no sense of humour.

More recently I have one that I've written. It was over a comment someone left me during the 750 event. I've had a couple of beta reads calling it hilarious but I can't help but feel I took a walk past the "in good taste" line. But same thing. Woke up early in the morning and couldn't stop giggling while this story played out in my head.

There was a third one but that one was a horror. I've got it in my idea folder but...not great on horror stories.

 

[LWulf]

How many of you get inspiration from waking up in the middle of the night from a weird dream and then feel compelled to write a story around it?
...
James

There is one story (more like a novel or series of novels) based on a dream, I've been working on since I was 12 ((Clean! Not sexual) Now I'm in my fifties). I've tried writing it several times unsuccessfully.

In my thirties, there was one story I feverishly wrote down when I woke up in the middle of the night. I felt I couldn't go back to sleep until I wrote it all out (it was fifteen, hand written, front and back pages long). I didn't bother publishing it anywhere but the story was curiously similar to "Meet Joe Black" which came out about 6-7 years after I shared the story with a couple of people.

One story I wrote and published here on literotica based on one dream I had, and a weaker story concept I just came up with one day. The weaker story, was just a base concept that I inserted into the more vivid and elaborate dream I had. That became "Tales from the Bad Girl Bar."

Back in 1992/3, there was a writer who came into a chatroom I habituated back then (HearMe/MPlayer). It was around about 2AM EST. A writer broke into the stale conversation of the hundred-odd wallflowers who weren't talking. He described how he was desperate on a deadline from a publisher and without a story concept, begging for anyone with a story concept he could spin to his publisher. So I gave him one of my dreams.
I am (Protector) number four.
One through three are dead.
They are coming for me next.
He asked who "they" were, and I told him Mogadorians. Actually I was pining over an ex-girlfriend at the time, and I just snatched up the first creative word I could. MOGA = Mean Old Grumpy A**hole which is what some netfriends used to "affectionately" call me, and Dori was the ex-girlfriend.
I gave more than that out, but only about a fifteen minute dissertation about the dream. I only asked for one thing in return; to be mentioned in the acknowledgement of the story if it got printed. He wrote seven books based on that dream, and none of them mentioned me, except: This book was created with the help of several people.

One dream story I have basically sketched out, figuratively and literally, here.

One day I fell asleep at my desk with a pencil in my hand. When I woke up, I found I had scrawled out "She screamed because she couldn't take it anymore." That gave me a little pause because I'm a dude, and had me wondering where that came from.

Yeah, No. I have no idea what it is to dream; stories, and how that affects your waking self.

 

[yukonnights]

No, can't say any stories ever came from a dream. Nor do my characters feel a need to haunt me after they're set free in the world.

But, the last couple of weeks I've awakened in the morning with clear understanding of plot holes/plot discrepancies in the story I'm currently working on. I think it's because I've been sitting up later writing. This is a new experience and it's helped my story to be quite a bit better. Be better still if I didn't build these traps in the first outline though, as it takes some unwinding of so many precious and beautiful words to weave in the patches.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I have a recurring dream about an imaginary town based on my own but with streets, businesses, shops and a seafront that don't exist in reality.

It is so consistent that I could almost draw a map of it. In my dreams, I often walk about it and meet the same people - again non-existent in reality - and interact with them.

Yes, I too have a recurring dream like that, which I forget until the next time I'm in it, and then I remember I've been there before. It used to be every year or two, but is much less frequent now, maybe every five years, even longer. It used to be the same place, the same people, but perhaps they're fading into memory, falling out of my sub-conscious. Strange places, dreams.

 

[yukonnights]

I think my dog must dream stories. They could be erotic, I don't know — she sort of barks in her sleep without opening her mouth for a couple of minutes sometimes. It's kind of cute, but for all I know she could be having a nightmare and running for her life too?