The Fox's Secret

Since I just shared the post-apocalyptic story I began after having a post-apocalyptic dream, I thought I would share this video that was created by my alter-ego over at YouTube.  It’s set to a really haunting “bonus track” from an AFI album.  It’s probably not the best video I ever made, but it is my favorite.  I called it “Ashes”.

After reading the dream from the previous post, you might ask yourself how I could start to write a story from it.  After all, it would be an odd story indeed that took place during the aftermath of a nuclear war that took place during the Clinton presidency.  What would I need to explain something like that?  Some weird time travel or alternate universe timeline?  That’s a bit far-fetched, even for me.  If you’re writing a poem, some bizarre juxtapositions might help you out.  But if you want to write a story, it’s best if you at least make it plausible.

So the first thing you need to do in writing a dream story is to discard anything that you just can’t find an explanation for at all.  The next thing to do is focus not so much on the events but on the overall feel of the dream–what emotions did it evoke.  In the dream that I had, the primary feelings I felt were about fearing death and doing whatever it took to survive.  That’s what I decided to make my story about.  And the most critical event that brought all of those feelings to a head was the point where I had to drown another human being to save my own life.  So that’s where I started.  And this was the beginning of a story I came up with:

Read more »

The three dreams that I’ve posted so far have been longer dreams that I felt had some deal of significance to them.  I thought it might be an interesting break to post a much shorter dream today.  It’s so short I might even call it a dream fragment.  But a short, fragmentary dream is closer to what most of us experience on a regular basis so I thought it would be a good idea to have an example of one up for people to read:

I’m on a train.  Usually, I take a train home during the holidays but for some reason I realize I’m on the train for a work related trip.  Most of the other riders must be “employees” of whatever company I’m working for, though I don’t have any clear idea what that company is or what I do.  All of a sudden I notice the train start to speed up much faster than normal and everyone has to sit down to keep from falling over.  I worry that we are about to crash because we’re going so fast around turns.  I look outside and realize the air is foggy and has an eerie orange glow to it.  The fog breaks for a second and I see that the tracks are high up on a cliff on a narrow ledge with the ocean out to our left and an even steeper mountainous cliff to our right.  There are these odd iron ladders and stair cases that go up the cliff.  Finally we round a corner and slow down.

Read more »