What dreams will come? And will they mean anything?
Early in my MFA, a teacher warned us, “Dreams are exposition in a ball gown.” And if you think about it, it’s pretty true most of the time. How often have we watched a character wake screaming from a nightmare that had revealed bits of his backstory? How many musical dreams have we suffered through in order to understand the roots of a farm animal’s anxieties?
I must admit that expository dreams are a step up from listening to a character talk about her backstory. At least we get to watch chase scenes and flying elephants instead of listening to a voiceover while the main character drifts glumly along barren streets.
But still, it seems like dreams have more dramatic potential than that. The first thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a dream with actual dramatic weight is The Wizard of Oz where almost the entire story takes place in a dream. Or Alice in Wonderland where the heroine creeps into a dream world through a rabbit hole. But in both these cases, the dream world functions as the real world, while the “real” world acts like an expository dream. In it, we meet characters that will show up later in altered form, or we learn of problems that the protagonist will find the fortitude to overcome while in the fantasy world.
So again, the dream–the reality alternate to the main reality of the story–functions as exposition.
As I consider what I’ve written, I suddenly realize that I’m defining dreams as alternate, ephemeral realities that have no impact on the “real” world. I also realize that this definition of a dream is historically pretty recent. Looking back on older literature, such as the Bible, I remember that people considered dreams as valid playesr in the real world. Pharoah took them seriously enough to hire dream interpreters. Joseph followed a dream and whisked his young family to Egypt. The premise of Revelation is that a dream can show a hidden reality that affects seen reality.
So there seem to be two basic approaches to dreams. The first treats them as valid realities. The second considers them mental phenomena that have only symbolic meaning. It seems to me that the second approach is considered the more realistic one these days. Thus, when a story treats a dream as a reality equal in validity to the “real” world, we call it fantasy or magical realism, while a story that treats a dream as unequal to the “real” world is called realism.
When a dream is a valid reality in a story, it obviously has all sorts of dramatic potential. We have thousands of years of literature to prove that. But the current conception of a dream, and the demands of realist literature, seems to strip a lot of that potential away, leaving us with the imaginative but dramatically limp dream scenes we read and see today. I even admit, with great sadness, that one of my favorite movie scenes–the dream sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries–though a masterpiece, is exposition.
In order to regain their fertility in realist writing, I think dreams need to become more like characters than settings. They need to be an antagonist or ally to the protagonist, working for or against the character’s goals and dramatic needs.
One metaphor for what I’m getting at is the movie Stranger than Fiction where a man discovers that he is a character in a novel-in-progress and tries to derail the plot. At one point, he decides that his best course of action is inaction and he holes himself up in his apartment, watching television, refusing to move even to change the channel. But suddenly a crane tears down the outside wall of his apartment and it becomes apparent that the plot, refusing to be stopped, has come to get him.
Judith Guest’s novel, Ordinary People, has a good example of a dramatically weighty dream. Conrad, a teen who survived a boating accident his brother didn’t, is the victim of nightmares that push him toward suicide. He spends the book wrestling with these dreams with the help of a psychiatrist, trying to beat them before they beat him.
I’m on the lookout for dramatically weighty dreams in realist literature or film. Any suggestions?
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November 17th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
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Here are a few that come to mind (though I’m choosing to ignore whatever you might mean by “realist”):
1. Demi Moore’s 2000 Film Passion of Mind. Haven’t seen it but the concept has potential: When she sleeps she dreams another life, then when, in that life, she goes to sleep, she wakes to the first life. And she can’t know which is real.
2. In Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, the main character dreams a dream and each time he dreams it he gets closer and closer to the reveal, which has to do with an angry ghost’s message. Those deepening dream sequences remain one of the most frightening things I’ve ever read. (Sadly though, the book as a whole falls flat at the end.)
3. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga did dozens of interesting things with dreams throughout its run. One of the most striking to me was the concept of Eternal Waking, but truly—the way he used dreams are legion.
4. Speaking of comics, DC just did a fascinating thing with a Sunday-comics style run of stories. One of the weaker strips was “Wonder Woman,” but in it, the hero is sent on tasks in her dreams, learning experiences — the dreams functioned almost as a saferoom for learning and striving.
But I’m with you. I think dream has a lot of potential. I’m going to take this post as a manifesto and see what I have to dream.
November 17th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I would recommend Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. The story is driven by a man who is terrified to sleep because his dreams have the power to reshape reality. If he dreams that his bothersome aunt never lived with his family because she died in a car accident, he’ll wake up 6 months after his aunt’s funeral and he’ll be the only person who realizes there’s been a change. Eventually, he finds himself on a psychologist’s couch. But instead of helping him, the psychologist learns how to bend this poor man’s dreams to his own ends, and that’s when it all begins to fall apart. It’s not a bad read and I think there have been a few movie adaptations, yet I haven’t seen them.
November 18th, 2009 at 12:15 am
completely missed the realist part. . . ‘fraid I got nothing then
November 18th, 2009 at 7:34 am
The first thing that comes to mind is Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint-Anthony, although it’s almost more hallucination all the way through than proper realist work. Another one, maybe, is Tyrone Slothrop, in Gravity’s Rainbow, a character constantly plagued by various dreams and paranoid visions. Also, an interesting dream episode at the end of W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo.
November 18th, 2009 at 11:37 am
If by “dramatically weighty,” we mean that the plot turns on the substance of the dreams (rather than the dreams simply being melodramatically ponderous), then The Path of Dreams certainly qualifies (and it keeps improving!). My sister was nice enough to offer that it “captures the transcendental nature of religion,” noting that “to capture the awe of a religious conversion/experience, the event has to be approached sideways.”
November 18th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
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I also reading Steven Graham Chapman’s “Long Red Road” which blends the real world and the characters’ dreams and visions so thoroughly I can’t always tell one from the other.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:49 am
You mentioned biblical-style dreams, so I’ll go there as opposed to purely sleepy-time dreams. Its been a while since I’ve read this, but I wonder if Potok’s _I am the Clay_ would fit what you’re after. The main character is a Jewish army chaplain during the Korean war and he has dreams/visions that impact the character and, therefore, the story. Can’t recall details. But a good read, especially for those who only think of Potok as writing child protagonists. One of my favorite Potok works.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
One of my favorite television series in any genre, Kanon, can be viewed as pure psychological melodrama, or as a series of overlapping dreams, or as the recollection of actual events. The less weighty The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Beautiful Dreamer plunge squarely into “Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man” territory.
May 19th, 2010 at 7:09 am
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Here are a few that come to mind (though I’m choosing to ignore whatever you might mean by “realist”):
1. Demi Moore’s 2000 Film Passion of Mind. Haven’t seen it but the concept has potential: When she sleeps she dreams another life, then when, in that life, she goes to sleep, she wakes to the first life. And she can’t know which is real.
2. In Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, the main character dreams a dream and each time he dreams it he gets closer and closer to the reveal, which has to do with an angry ghost’s message. Those deepening dream sequences remain one of the most frightening things I’ve ever read. (Sadly though, the book as a whole falls flat at the end.)
3. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga did dozens of interesting things with dreams throughout its run. One of the most striking to me was the concept of Eternal Waking, but truly—the way he used dreams are legion.
4. Speaking of comics, DC just did a fascinating thing with a Sunday-comics style run of stories. One of the weaker strips was “Wonder Woman,” but in it, the hero is sent on tasks in her dreams, learning experiences — the dreams functioned almost as a saferoom for learning and striving.
But I’m with you. I think dream has a lot of potential. I’m going to take this post as a manifesto and see what I have to dream.