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Dreamscapes of my Mind

They say to write what you know. That's a hard thing for me to accept sometimes. There's always this balance between two extremes for me. I've always wanted to write science fiction, and to a certain extent, that's the only thing I've ever been really interested in. Of course I tend to lump this all into fantasy vs. science fiction, which is really a different post all together, but this is the crux of the matter in my mind. You see, I figured out recently that what I know is science fiction.

I used to think that writing what you know meant that I was supposed to write about things that I actually knew about, school, going to work, office politics, what it's like to be a father, the trials and tribulations of everyday life. The kind of thing that when incorporated into a screenplay, you could shoot it without a single special effect. All that's nice, but I don't think they make a compelling story all by themselves. I just love space too much. Space and pirates. Har!

So recently I sat down and listed out all the fantastic science fiction that I've ever loved, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Illustrated Man to Star Wars and Harry Potter. What I know is all science fiction and fantasy. So, I may as well write that. I kept the list, and maybe I'll talk about them all, everything from the first time I deconstructed a story into it's component parts to learning to write notes in the dark for Film School (I can still do it pretty well) but again, those are all another post.

Take the movie Dreamscape for instance, a fairly low budget thriller about psychics that train to enter people's dreams in a big secret government project, when it turns out that they are being trained to become killers, keying in on the idea that if you die in your dream, you die in life. I know this not to be true from personal experience, having died many times in my dreams, but that's not the point, it's still an interesting story that keeps coming back over and over again for me. Sometimes I think I'm the only one I know who cares for the film, but that didn't stop me from using it as inspiration for a screenplay I wrote during College for a screenwriting course.

Dream delving. It's a powerful concept isn't it? The idea of entering someone else's dream, or even just taking control of your own. I've done that sometimes, when I woke up just enough to realize it's a dream, and you have a moment there of lucidity, and you're suddenly in control. Who wouldn't want to do that on a massive scale? I mean what if the dream world is the real world and this one is just an illusion we use to keep us from flipping out at just how wild, crazy and creative the world around us really is?

Drop a dream in your story and see what happens.