Inchoate Ascendant™: June 29, 2012.

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June 29, 2012

Waking and Real Nightmares For All

Half of the year is gone now. There is nothing new to report here. Everything remains behind the scenes and moving at an excruciatingly slow pace.

I've been thinking about dreams and nightmares lately. They are great tools in and out of fiction--as usual of all types: books, scripts, video games, and role-playing games. One of the common feelings about horror and younger people that keeps coming out, and it was refreshed for me through a movie lately, is that horror movies and comics and the like give nightmares to these minors, and new to the genre people. My experience is that immersing in these stories allows people to have their nightmares while awake and then they can have not necessarily less--in number--while sleeping, but weaker nightmares. This is a push and pull, and I think as you take more in that it is more prevalent toward pull into the real world. You reach a point where your nightmares are hardly different than the movies you have seen. You've seen the horrors before and had time to deal with them.

The key difference though between these waking and sleeping nightmares is intimacy. You immerse yourself in the story in front of you to only a particular degree. You are always a tiny step away from being knocked out of it. For the most part you are a degree separate too because you are not the viewpoint character of the story. In your sleeping nightmares, even if you are not you in the dream, you cannot step out of that viewpoint. You are stuck in whatever situation with no escape, or no release, until such time that the nightmare ends or you awake out of it. You can't put the book down or turn the movie off.

On a different but related note, I've also been considering some works with the idea that there may be no difference between a (sleeping) nightmare and reality where certain events are involved. Obviously this consideration is for fiction in that no one decides to believe some traumatic dream events are real for the fun of it. They either believe such a thing is possible, or that it is not, and they can even change their mind, but not on a lark. The basic premise is that an encounter with an extra-dimensional entity such as an alien, devil, or other, in a dream or nightmare is as real as if the encounter happened while you (the character in this case) were awake. It's just an idea I'm toying with using. I also have some possession related ideas I'm considering writing into something.

Music: Coma by Guns N' Roses.