Hmmm. I've had both the multi-layered dreams where you can never get back to it and the ones where whenever the dream recurrs it gets a litle further. At least one recurrent dream has come back half a dozen times and with gaps of as much as a decade, while another once hit me four days in a row, each time scary enough to wake me out of a sound sleep into sitting up sweating at the same point. That last one I could do without Ever having again.
A few have stuck with me enough to write short stories out of. The really fun ones, though, are when I fade back in from daydreaming to my keyboard and my fingers are still moving. I once started out to write a simple description of a scene as a writing practise exercise and something entirely different started pouring out onto the page through my fingers without any conscious effort on my part. I was sort of observing and just along for the ~ride. Only fifteen pages into it(!) did I discover that it was a minor character intro Leading Into the description (that I had originally planned on) by riding into the scene ... And it came out Much better than I would have believed possible when I sat down to type.
I've noticed that my dreamscapes are fairly consistent and contiguous, albeit in odd ways. At least one series of dreams were set in a Gigantic theatre (procenium [sp?] arch well over 120 feet high and several hundred feet wide), which turned out to have a roof hatch leading up into a field on the fringes of a farm setting for an entirely different set of dreams.
Notepad or keyboard by the bed can help if you take notes Immediately, before common sense kicks in. If you let consciousness stabilize first, you tend to lose the critical sense of things. Even several words or phrases can be enough to reconstruct from upon occasion. Good luck with it!
(no subject)
A few have stuck with me enough to write short stories out of. The really fun ones, though, are when I fade back in from daydreaming to my keyboard and my fingers are still moving. I once started out to write a simple description of a scene as a writing practise exercise and something entirely different started pouring out onto the page through my fingers without any conscious effort on my part. I was sort of observing and just along for the ~ride. Only fifteen pages into it(!) did I discover that it was a minor character intro Leading Into the description (that I had originally planned on) by riding into the scene ... And it came out Much better than I would have believed possible when I sat down to type.
I've noticed that my dreamscapes are fairly consistent and contiguous, albeit in odd ways. At least one series of dreams were set in a Gigantic theatre (procenium [sp?] arch well over 120 feet high and several hundred feet wide), which turned out to have a roof hatch leading up into a field on the fringes of a farm setting for an entirely different set of dreams.
Notepad or keyboard by the bed can help if you take notes Immediately, before common sense kicks in. If you let consciousness stabilize first, you tend to lose the critical sense of things. Even several words or phrases can be enough to reconstruct from upon occasion. Good luck with it!