Dream Sequences - Yes or No?
Virtual Office Hours #4
Note: This is one of a series of “ask me anything” posts I did for a group of writers I worked with in fall 2024.
Q: I’ve been told it’s not a good idea to include a dream sequence in my book. What do you think? Are dream sequences okay?
A: The short answer is no, dream sequences are usually not okay. (Neither are hallucinations.) But, as always, there’s a longer answer, and (also as always) it starts with, “It depends.”
First, I’ll talk about why writing a dream sequence is generally a bad idea. But I’m a big believer in learning the rules, then learning how to break them, so I also want to talk about when a dream sequence might enhance your novel or memoir.
As with any other device, if you are going to break the rules, you need a good reason to do so. We talked about this with respect to prologues, and the same applies to dream sequences, which are generally a bad idea. If you’re going to write a dream sequence, it should be relevant to your story, it should accomplish something, and it should advance your story. In other words, you have to earn the right to write it. If you are set on writing a dream sequence, it’s up to you to make it work.
I don’t mean to sound harsh, but the biggest problem with dream sequences is that they are often the result of lazy writing. Like so many other literary devices that are frowned upon, they tend to be a way of taking the easy way out. For example, writers who don’t know any better often misuse them for exposition, to build false tension, to contrive a solution to a problem the protagonist is having, or to tell the reader something, instead of putting the work in and using their writing skills to show the reader.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
—Pablo Picasso
A poorly written dream sequence can interrupt the narrative drive you’ve worked so hard to build and may come across as self-indulgent. If you let the reader know up front that it’s a dream, it can lower the emotional stakes. If you don’t let them know up front, it can leave the reader feeling tricked or cheated. On top of all that, the overuse of dream sequences in writing means they are considered cliché.
Here’s another quandry: to be effective, a dream sequence should be intentional, well-defined, and vivid. But in real life, most of the time, human beings don’t recall their dreams vividly, if they can recall them at all.
“Let’s have some new clichés.”
—Samuel Goldwyn
Especially egregious: A dream sequence that turns out to be a “twist.”
Consider as an example the entire 9th season of the popular 1980s television series Dallas. A popular character, Bobby Ewing, died at the end of Season 8, but then the actor who played him, Patrick Duffy, decided to return to the series. The producers were thrilled to have him back—ratings had lagged with him gone. But how to orchestrate his return? The solution the producers settled on was that all of Season 9 had been a bad dream. Surprise—Bobby’s alive! Which undid some of the things that had happened during Season 9, but weirdly did not undo everything that had happened.
There were continuity issues not only in Dallas but in its spin-off, Knot’s Landing, which had incorporated Bobby’s death into its storylines, too. And guess what? Knot’s Landing producers were so mad they decided to cut ties with Dallas and leave Bobby dead in their series—problem solved.
Suffice it to say, “The Dream Season,” as it’s come to be known, did not go over with viewers as well as the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger had. Dallas is said to have lost another 10% audience share as a result, and ratings steadily declined over the next five years. Learn from Dallas’s mistakes: neither TV viewers nor readers like to be toyed with.
By the same token, opening a story with a dream sequence rarely works, I think for the same reason prologues rarely work. It takes a lot of thought and extra work to pull it off.
“Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.”
—Marilynne Robinson
So, what’s the right way to include a dream sequence? Now that we know and understand the rule, how do we go about breaking it?
I think the answer lies both in intention and in execution.
If you’re tempted to include a dream sequence in your story, the first thing I suggest you do is ask yourself why. What will the dream sequence accomplish? Will it help characterize your protagonist in a way that you can’t do in the story itself? Will it show us something in the protagonist’s subconscious that we can’t get in the narrative? Will it hint at something a character is refusing to confront? How does it fit into your story, and how does it move the story forward?
Once you’ve established your intention, write the dream sequence with intention. Make it clear and vivid versus vague and ambiguous. Let the reader in on it, and make it interesting and engaging. Most importantly, write it in such a way that it becomes its own little story within a story—with its own beginning, middle, and end— and so that this smaller story serves the larger story.