More daydream than lucid dream

One figure of speech about writing fiction that's held up for me is that it's like dreaming, or dreaming while awake, or lucid dreaming. But I'd add that the most apt simile is that it's like daydreaming. I think a lot of writing advice gives the impression that the best way to write is to keep a dream journal, wake up in the middle of the night, and write furiously while your dream is still fresh and your conscious, linguistic, rational mind hasn't completely taken back over yet. This is, in fact, almost exactly the advice Olen Butler gives in his fiction how-to book, From Where You Dream.

While this image of a good story as something like a dream converted into words has held up for me, I'd like to add the caveat that it's more like a daydream for me than lucid dreaming. In both a day dream and the dreaming we do during our deep sleep, our brains tend to churn over whatever has been occupying their neurons in the last few hours before the dream begins. With a daydream, the link is somewhat direct: someone says something about getting takeout, and you start thinking about how good takeout was in Korea, and then you wonder what it would be like to deliver food in Korea on a moped, and then you've imagined this moped delivery guy's life, and you realize you've been dreaming a story. Everything is a bit linear in your thinking process. If you can remember enough, you'll recall how you got from point A to B to Z. In a dream during sleep, this linear process doesn't seem to hold.

The majority of stories I've written have started as daydreams. I'll use "Sunflower," which recently got published, as an example. I think part of how I ended up dreaming this story came from reading another short story, "The Stamp Collector" by Dave King, which I wrote about here. It's about an alcoholic in search of his rock bottom. I was sort of following some thought having to do with that story, and I was also hating myself for having just eaten too much again.

I was thinking about how eating too much isn't just bad for my vanity or my health, but it's actually a sin of sorts, because it means I'm using more of the Earth's limited resources than I should be. Overeating is like leaving the lights on. I was thinking about what would happen if everyone who over-consumed got what they deserved, and somehow, my brain put together King's story with overeating and the karma thereof, and I landed on the idea of a karmic rock bottom.

That's just where I started from, of course. As I wrote the story, I had to poke and prod, and I used the naturally occurring elements to build further than what my initial burst of imagination had been able to accomplish. Calling the woman Sunflower and then using the image of a sunflower as a central symbol came later. The dream gave me the scaffolding, but from there, I had to use my normal brain to finish the work. That's why I feel like writing a story is more akin to daydreaming than deep-sleep dreaming, because it's a negotiation between normal cognitive functioning and the breaking loose from reality that comes with a dream. It's a middle state between the logic of your brain after it's had its morning coffee and it's focused on work and your brain when it's whacked out on vodka and Gatorade and you pass out on the couch.