Dream, Dream, Dream

by Stephanie Black

Last week, I dreamed that my new book had been released, but for some inexplicable reason, my publisher had changed the cover. Instead of a cover designed to tingle spines with an aura of suspense, the cover was now light and bright and looked a lot like the cover to Annette Lyon’s Spires of Stone. I was not happy with the change. Don’t get me wrong—I love Annette’s cover. It’s extremely well done and suits her book perfectly. However, Annette’s book is a historical romance, and mine is contemporary suspense and I couldn’t understand why my publisher would ditch the creepy cover they originally designed and use a cover not suited to a suspense novel. And to add insult to injury, there were hearts printed on the title page, and some of the scenes were done in comic book form.

I’m no dream analyst, but I’ll give it a shot. This dream could mean:

--I worry about my books, like every author does, and want everything to go smoothly with the release (see last week’s blog).
--I’m obsessed with Annette Lyon.
--I have a pathological fear of romance novels.
--I’m weird.

Dreams overall are a funny thing. Do you ever have dreams where suddenly some kid from junior high that you haven’t thought about in twenty years pops into your dream and you think, where did he come from? A friend once dreamed that I’d faked my own death to get out of being Primary chorister. Strange dream. I mean, I can see someone faking their death to get out of being Scoutmaster, but Primary chorister?

One thing I’ve figured out about dreams is that generally speaking (and excepting Lehi-style visions) unless you can summarize a dream in a short paragraph, hitting only the highlights, your audience will be asleep, face-down in their Cheerios, before you can finish saying, “And I knew it was my high school, even though it didn’t look like my high school, and I couldn’t find my locker, and I was going to be late to class, only I didn’t know what classes I had, and it was the end of the semester and I was going to flunk all my finals . . . ”

Why do dreams tend to bore listeners? They’re not real, for one thing. If the story about the impending academic failure were true, likely your listener would exhibit some genuine interest and sympathy—“You poor thing! What did you do? What happened?” But since it’s a dream, nothing happened. It’s not real. Maybe the dream ended when you handed in your math final and your teacher (Yoda) said, “Flunked you have. Get a scholarship you will not.” Then you woke up and said, “Wait a minute. I’m not even in school anymore and I already have a college degree.” Poof! Tension gone.

So why does fiction work? It’s not real either. But it follows a narrative structure that makes it interesting. When a reader picks up a novel (unless it’s some wildly experimental thing) he or she knows that the story is going somewhere. The author has a point. The story has a beginning, a middle, a climax, a wrap-up. It's not just a random recitation of events, and the reader knows it’s not going to disintegrate with, “And then I woke up.” He or she is willing to suspend disbelief long enough to react to the story as if it were real.

Speaking of creating the illusion of reality, I once had a dream where the villain from The Believer was chasing me. I hid under a bush. I don't think he caught me. Or maybe I just woke up.