Dreams and POV, How in blazes do you write one?!

[Penny]

So, dreams are illogical. they do not make much sense when you wake up and anyone actually watching your point of view while you had a dream would be very confused.
I know some writers take the view of using very logical images. telling a story within the story.

I am taking a more surreal approach to writing a dream sequence where I effectively jumpcut between the characters within the dream with a shifting 3rd person perspective. my dreamer takes on the characters within the dreams point of view as his own.
I am struggling with maintaining who is who within the scene despite only following a single point of view.
I have tried a few different strategies and this strategy seems to be flowing well, but I feel I might be confusing readers.
Anyone else got some neat tips for writing dreams for me I can steal >.> Or ideas on how to maintain the point of view clarity while shifting within one scene.

 

[Joshua Jones]

Hmmm... Would you be willing to explain a little more what role they have in the story? Are they surrealist interpretations of events prior to the start of your story, future events, or reflections on what is currently happening? If one of the first two, I would say embrace the confusion as foreshadowing of what is revealed in the narrative, and if the third, I would encourage using symbolism as the driving force of the dream narrative, rather than character.

Of course, if you are going in a completely different direction, like having the POV character taking over other people's bodies through dreams, then you need to go a completely different direction...

 

[Steve Harrison]

My thoughts would be to write a version of the entire dream sequence from each POV. Then, at every point in the scene, you will have multiple choices and hopefully be able to structure - or hang together - the scene in a way that is clear to you and the reader.

Of course, you might be even more confused...

 

[Penny]

@Joshua Jones
Well in my story the character is having a nightmare of his youth, he switches point of view between himself and a bully who he is brutally torturing in the dream. so he ends up torturing himself essentially. The surrealism parts of it is that it is essentially torturing himself. and both initiates that torture and then receives it by becoming the victim.
Its kind of a way of showing his inner turmoil, he is unsure of his own nature and I use the dream to show that to the reader.

 

[Joshua Jones]

@Joshua Jones
Well in my story the character is having a nightmare of his youth, he switches point of view between himself and a bully who he is brutally torturing in the dream. so he ends up torturing himself essentially. The surrealism parts of it is that it is essentially torturing himself. and both initiates that torture and then receives it by becoming the victim.
Its kind of a way of showing his inner turmoil, he is unsure of his own nature and I use the dream to show that to the reader.

Aha! Then, I would simply embrace the confusion. Your character is emotionally traumatized and internally conflicted; he seems to be identifying himself with the bully. That surely would be confusing inside his mind, so let it be confusing in narrative too. The context will make sense of it.

I, anyway, would enjoy that sort of depiction. Then again, I created a story arc based around the five stages of grief, using my protagonists singing voice as a symbol, so I am somewhat inclined toward that sort of thing...

 

[HareBrain]

Its kind of a way of showing his inner turmoil

I'd hesitate before using dreams (or any other scene) just to show an aspect of personality, unless it's very short. A scene should ideally both develop character and plot. Add to this the problem that we usually find other people's dreams less interesting than our own, and they become quite risky. In my experience, dreams in stories work when they're less like real dreams and more like clairvoyant experiences, and when their aim is to set up mysteries.

 

[Penny]

This dreams only around 300 or so words so its quite short. I had a 600 worder going but I have culled much flab from it.
I don't think it shows much of the characters personality it is more about showing a progressing change within the character that will continue through the story. It shows how he was as a child but sets him against his child self with him essentially being tortured by it. so his personality is kind of starting to fracture and a dream seems like the best way to start the process.

@Joshua Jones
sonds almost as confusing as this

mainly starts at about 2:30 "You play the ghost of a dream of a memory of a cyborg warrior trying to find his dead wife inside a poem"

 

[Venusian Broon]

I can see what you are trying to do (I flit about in many types of PoVs in my dreams), although I hesitate to call that surrealism, but fair enuff.

I think the best option is just to write it out and give it to others to see if they stumble across the transitions. It feels like it will be a slightly more complicated third person omniscient. I personally can't think of any other work of fiction that has handled dreams that way. Which is either good, because you'll write something interesting; or bad because, actually, it just doesn't work! Just try it and see.

Sort of related:

There was a TV program here on the UK (a long time ago) that explored a real persons experience of schizophrenia.

She had a number of symptoms, including a voice in her head that would constantly berate and put her down, swear at her, tell her to do bad things etc. She knew she was mentally ill and was, I believe, doing well at coping with it - actually because she was training to be a medical doctor.

(Although this was causing stress because she was keeping her condition very secret as I don't think she could qualify if it were known she had such a condition. In fact the program used an actor rather than the real person. As for the ethics of this, I dunno, that's really another topic...)

Anyway she was getting therapy and as part of getting this treatment, she slowly realised that the voice inside her head was that of a bully from childhood that she had forgotten - so her schizophrenia 'resurrected' an antagonist, and in a way tortured herself.

It feels not a million miles away from your dream idea.

Anyway, food for thought.

 

[Penny]

@Venusian Broon Yeah, there are parallels. I am just calling it personality fragmentation, as for surrealism... All dreams are at least in my experience pretty surreal. The problem is getting the right mix of the strange and the lucid so as to not confuse the reader but still confuse them...>.>

 

[Cathbad]

I've never had a dream that wasn't in the First Person... so shouldn't they be written that way?

 

[Brian G Turner]

If you're writing a dream, then you are in the dreamer's POV, whether you like it or not. The only way you can technically jump between POVs in a dream is for that dream to simply be another plane of reality, ie, not actually a dream at all.

If you really want to have another character's perspective in a dream, then you could try to give it via dialogue - or simply sacrifice the idea as one of those darlings you have to kill.

However, I'm not sure why you'd want to use a dream as a flashback instead of just using a flashback??

Writing a good protagonist is difficult enough to do well without trying to confuse the issue.

 

[Penny]

@Brian G Turner
Yea, it is all within his pov, but his pov, pov changes >.> the only thing staying the same pov is the reader >.> my head hurts now.

So similar to if your character was a consciousness hopping hitchhiker of some kind.

The reason I am using a dream is, the character in question is tightly controlled, he does not have regrets, no remorse, no emotions. it is all strictly controlled through his own form of self-discipline.
He is not the kind of character that would daydream, the only way to have this kind of thing happen with a character like that is to get at it when the character has no control, such as when he is dreaming when his mental defences come down.

Plus I am from an animation background and we had drummed into us. "Flashbacks are the devil!" when we were doing scriptwriting so I avoid vivid flashbacks in writing and this one needs to be vivid to give the right kind of emotional responses for the character.

 

[Steve Harrison]

I just remembered David Mitchell's novel, Ghostwritten, a series of connected stories following different characters. One of them is a kind of disembodied, roaming consciousness that jumps from one person to another, much like a virus, and experiences life through both it's own and the 'infected' person's POV. It's very cleverly done and might give you some ideas.