In your dreams, you can fight monsters, run down endless hallways, soar through the air, and become bounty hunters across time and space. These dreams are powerful because they allow us to connect with the exciting; they will enable us to disconnect from the mundane life we lead and entice those reading your story with something fantastic and wonderful.

In your story, you can introduce a dream that leads your character down a particular path or perhaps give them something that makes them uncomfortable. These feelings can carry on into the waking world, making it difficult for the character to move on. Possibly their dream reflects in specific actions in the characters around them, or maybe the feeling haunts them for a time before disappearing into nothingness.

Why would we incorporate a dream into this or any writing piece? In some writings, it can be used as a premonition, a sense of Deja vu, a sense of foreboding of the future that comes to be after other events. It gives the character a warning, which the reader may not even be able to interpret at the time, increasing the tension in the chapter.

Imagine that you have a character walking down a long winding hallway with corners, spiral staircases, haunting statues, and dark velvet curtains hiding away melting paintings. Some music could be playing, something soft, melodic, like a piano or violin. What kind of emotions would this evoke in someone reading the passage? If the character pulled back one of the thick curtains and revealed a doorway that led them to the gramophone playing that music, a strange chair covered in blood, and a screeching sound from the empty gramophone- they could be so shocked that they would awaken covered in sweat, wondering where that dream came from. Down the line, they could be the ones placing a record into the gramophone, or perhaps they could be the ones who made the chair bloody. Maybe it could all be a metaphor for their darker part that they have yet to uncover. It is up to you, the writer, to provide this to your audience.

While you can write for anyone, the most important person you can write for is yourself. Breaking away from the topic of dreams, I just wanted to let everyone know that I have struggled with this, and if you struggle with this, you’re not alone. My family had to remind me of this fact. Before you write for anyone else, write for yourself. Discover what you want to write about and write what makes you satisfied before anyone else. This way, when it is all said and done, when you look back on your time writing, it will not be with regret. Instead, it will be with love, as you have poured yourself into your work.

Let your dreams become your characters’ dreams, and be the world that your characters live in. No matter what you decide, you’re doing well as long as you continue to try.