: I've got to be honest about dream sequences. I'm not a big fan of them while reading, but looking back on my writing, I'm horrible about writing them. Maybe I see my character's unconscious as a place to stretch out and see what's really eating at him. I now ask, why not stretch out while the character's conscious?In Christine, Dennis is plagued by nightmares about Christine - good-old, present tense, in italics nightmares. I'm not sure how effective a dream sequence is in heightening the horror or a character's self-awareness. I know that when I wake up, whatever was in the dream didn't happen. When have dream sequences worked? Other than the book of Genesis and a movie called Dreamscape where dreams were central to the plot, I can't think of any.
I had a professor that told me that dreams are only interesting to the person who did the dreaming - and yet, somehow, I always have the impulse to tell my poor patient wife when I have what I consider a "really weird dream." From
now on I resolve to curb my habit of writing dream sequences (or at least editing them out).
Presidential Reference: I drove a mile and a half down to JFK Drive, which - according to my mother, who grew up in Libertyville - used to be at teh center of one of the town's most desirable neighborhoods back around the time Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
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