#also. you know what. post-s4 the batwings thing feels less nonsensical and random and more weirdly prescient.

[marypsue]

30. Talk to me about the role dreams play in your writing life. Have you ever used material from your dreams in your writing? Have you ever written in a dream? Did you remember it when you woke up?

[from this meme]

The most direct example of the influence of dreams on my writing is one that I mentioned in the director's commentary for Reincarnation Blues. These lines:

Stamped into the starry void around them like an artificial horizon was a massive ring, parallel lines glowing red like gashes cut into the dream to reveal an inferno on the other side. And between those lines, all around the horizon, burned familiar symbols.

Were based on a nightmare that I had actually had, that involved Bill Cipher, while I was in the middle of writing RB. It was a deeply weird experience, because that dream was one I had shortly prior to the release of NWHS, and it was extremely meta. I was having a different unrelated nightmare, and then realised I was dreaming and tried to wake myself up. At that point, the whole horizon of the dream lit up with this glowing red circle of arcane symbols which rose up, wrapping around the entire sky like seeing Saturn's rings from a position standing on the planet, and Bill Cipher's awful cackle echoed over the dream the way sounds you can hear in the real world sometimes do while you're asleep, as the whole dream started to disintegrate. And then I woke up, scared half to death...to see the shadow of a four-fingered, noodly black arm splashed across my ceiling, reaching toward me, outlined in blue light.

...it turned out to be the shadow of a tangle of power cords in the light from the power bar they were plugged into. But that is probably the third closest I've ever come in my life to having a very real heart attack.

(Also, when NWHS came out, the ring of symbols around the portal looked extremely familiar for some reason I couldn't place. I don't remember what they actually turned out to be, but they weren't invented for the show, so I'd probably seen them somewhere before NWHS came out and forgotten about it. But I am still at least 75% convinced that I also saw them in that red ring around the horizon of that disintegrating dream.

Brains are weird.)

Oh! And the original idea that sprawled into the road goes ever on was inspired by a snippet of a dream about Shit Going Extremely Wrong in the secret evil Russian mall basement. Be grateful I left out the bit about batwings.

Usually I'm not quite that directly and literally inspired by dreams, though. I'd say the most frequent way dreams influence my writing is when I'm trying to capture a sense of unease or dread or unreality - I often go back to how nightmares feel.

I don't remember ever writing in a dream.