I think I just dreamed a surprisingly good short story

[simont]

I just had a strange and vivid dream in which a large bear had somehow got into my house. (Not my house, actually; I seemed to be living with a largish family which included, for instance, a completely fictitious Uncle Henry.) It seemed quite happy in there and wasn't trying to kill or eat anyone, but most of us were nervous of it (of course) and wanted it gone. Only you can't exactly argue with a large black bear, and we weren't quite sure who you call in the UK when you have a problem with a bear. We tried to lure it outside once or twice, but there seemed to be a bit of confusion: occasionally we'd think we'd managed it, but find it indoors again. We didn't seem to be very good at bear-luring. It also didn't help that at least one member of the family seemed totally untroubled by the bear's presence, and never seemed particularly bothered about helping our eviction efforts by having the right doors open and shut.

Eventually we noticed that there was one time of day when it seemed to particularly want to be outdoors, so we left the door open to let it out and then shut and locked it once it had left, breathing a sigh of relief.

Only it didn't end there; the bear was subsequently seen lurking around the garden and making life difficult for people trying to get in and out of the house. So the family thought about it a bit and eventually came up with a plan to scare it away for good using electrified booby-traps in the garden. This involved people going outdoors, of course, to set the traps.

Now comes the twist in the tale which really made me think my subconscious had turned into a short-story writer.

While an unspecified family member and I were outdoors fiddling with electric wires, we were grabbed and dragged into the bushes by other members of the family, and tied up. I think it was around this point that the dream switched to an omniscient third-person perspective, in which we see an identical-looking copy of me return to the house, which turns out to now be completely full of people who look like my family but are in fact were-bears, and have just finished kidnapping the real family one by one and taking their places. The original bear turns out to be the alternate form of the fake Uncle Henry, who (unlike the rest of the fake family) happened not to be happy spending all his time in human form. The real family, by now, is all either dead or tied up in the bushes.

At this point the story ended, because I woke up and went ‘wow, I have to write this down’. It's a perfect natural end point for the short story anyway, though.

The thing I find fascinating about this, as a dream, is its sheer coherence and plot consistency. There were admittedly some slightly dreamlike oddities I've glossed over in the description above (notably that the original bear was inexplicably carrying around a telescope, and the reason it liked to be outside at a certain time of day was that it had apparently learned that looking through the telescope at things was fun), but the twist at the end actually explained what had seemed like dreamy inconsistencies at the start (such as the mysterious difficulty in evicting the bear, and the one other family member who didn't seem bothered by its presence), and thereby turned the whole thing into really quite a satisfying narrative experience. It's almost as if it had been planned from the start by an actual writer. The idea that a subconscious without free access to my logic centres was able to come up with that in sequential order is frankly very impressive.

Unless, of course, my memories of the first half of the dream were subtly modified during or after the second half, to make them match up to it better; I don't think that would be beyond the bounds of possibility, since memories of dreams are pretty fragile in general, but that would have been pretty impressive too! It paints a picture of my subconscious as a short-story writer with a word processor, who gets to go back and edit the beginning bits once it knows how the story's going to end.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I don't dream dreamed events in chronological order.

When I was a kid I kept getting told to show my working in maths. ("If you don't show the working, you get no marks if your answer is wrong." "But my answer isn't wrong, and if I show incorrect working I lose marks even if my answer's right.") This sometimes entered my dreams.

Once, I dreamed I was given a tricky maths problem and wrote the answer down, but was then forced to go back and do the working. When I woke up I realised the problem was a genuine hard problem I'd been given and I couldn't possibly have reached the solution without doing the intermediate working, so must actually have dreamed it before the solution even though I dreamed I did it afterwards.

Also, I often have lucid dreams, and enjoy them greatly. I've realised that not only can I choose how the dream progresses once it's lucid, I can also insert extra events earlier on. Indeed, if things become seriously inconsistent I wake up, so this is often necessary if I'm making an ambitious change to the dream's course.

For what it's worth, if a bear wishes to "make life difficult" in real life, you're dead. Frost On My Moustache reproduces the advice given by the Svalbard government on how to deal with polar bears. From memory:

• Hope it's not noticed you.
  
• If it does see you, hope it's not interested in you.
  
• If it is interested in you, retreat while repeatedly firing eighty-calibre guns at its head, neck and chest as rapidly as possible.
  
• Fervently hope it stops moving before it reaches you.
  
• When it stops moving, wait a minute then approach cautiously and deliver half a dozen more shots to the cranium.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

must actually have dreamed it before the solution even though I dreamed I did it afterwards.

That is interesting. Though I don't know if that's necessarily the interpretation, if it had happened to me I might consider the possibility that I first dreamed I had an elegant solution without actually containing the specific answer, even though I thought I did, and then dreamed the working, and then woke up and filled out the working subconsciously to have the answer and assumed that was the answer I had at first.

[gerald_duck]

This was one of the more involved IMO past-paper questions. I really doubt I was capable of retconning a fully-worked solution subconsciously once awake.

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. FWIW I am capable of debugging while asleep. When I wake up I have a clear image of the bug, where I hadn't noticed when I went to sleep that there was a bug, nor did I know that I recalled my source code so exactly. (Unless I subconsciously noticed it when writing the code, and that information took a while to surface.)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

I think you might all like this (http://www.tenthdimension.com/medialinks.php) flash animation.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

LOL. Sometimes the subconscious is quite inventive :)

You should write it down. Although I'm not sure as what -- most of it strikes me as a children's story, but the ending is a bit downbeat. Is it possible you all ran away to become acrobats or something, after being thrown out? Or were evil people who deserved it? :)

[gerald_duck]

It already sounds like the bastard offspring of Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. Maybe they were OK because the house was made of porridge and the one man who'd not been affected was sleeping in everyone's bed?

[flats.livejournal.com]

If you've got a bear in the house, I suppose the right thing to do is call the RSPCA. I like having thought about what to do in such an eventuality!

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I think dreams are almost superposed when you wake up (not literally in an odd, Penrose kind of sense, just a metaphor). And then you kind of unwind them when you wake up.

So it's a bit like, umm, all the words in English being divided into catergories 0-9 and then dreaming a long number, and then when you wake up you find a path through the digits that is cohrerent.

[timotab.livejournal.com]

Good thing you don't live near Porlock.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

It sounds somewhat like 'the father thing', which I read in a book of short stories when I was younger.

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

Some good authors have got a lot of good stuff from their dreams: sometimes, most of it, IIRC.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Your subconscious mind is cleverer than many people give it credit for. :)