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Dreaming on a Flukey Friday…

Yeah so I just woke up… What a week. ONE PAGES (we have a couple more), rewrite, email, REWRITE. LOL. Today’s a little different for me… I broke some new ground and I want to share it with you.

One of my personal rules for writing a screenplay is to run the movie through my head when it’s time to go to sleep. I want it to be the very LAST thing that goes through my mind before I start sawing logs.

I am both projector and projectionist as I fly through my film searching for my characters. I find them doing things that aren’t in the script. I watch them eat. Tell jokes. Shop. Admire the scenery. They become completely REAL to me which eventually helps me make them completely real to you.

I know what you’re thinkin’… Sleeping isn’t writing.

Or is it?

I promise not get all “new age” on you but I will throw some simple facts at you…

Sleeping does shut our body down to rest and rebuild from the previous day’s bullshit. That, I’m certain we can all agree on but don’t think for a minute that you’re not aware of things while you’re sleeping. You are. You’re in a very active state during that precious slumber.

Psychologists have proven that our brain waves during sleepy time are much more varied than when we’re awake and active during the day (or night if you’re a vampire like me).

Right before we fall asleep, our brain activity emits waves that are called low beta. Upon closing our eyes, our brainwaves descend from beta, to alpha, to theta and finally, when we fall asleep, to delta brainwaves.

Human beings dream in 90 minute cycles. When the delta brainwave frequencies increase into the frequency of theta brainwaves, active dreaming takes place and often becomes more … Otherwise known as , or REM… A characteristic of .

It’s during this time that we become the director of our movie as well as the screenwriter. This is where you get to make your own $100 million dollar movie. This is where you get to see what works and what doesn’t work.

When we write our movie, we tend to leave out all the normal, everyday events that happen to us because well… They’re boring. Boring to the audience that is but not boring to me and they shouldn’t be boring to you.

As you run your movie inside your noggin, you should explore all those areas that you couldn’t bring yourself to explore as you bang out the screenplay.

That’s right — EXPLORE! Take those locations in your story and just start flying through them… Inspect the walls… The doors. The windows. The carpeting. Fly around the outside of the location to see what’s out there and make mental notes… This is a dream so open up your nostrils and breathe in the location… Good… Now listen. What do you hear? Water dripping? Crickets chirping? Frogs? Trains? Sirens?

Remember, this is your story… Your movie. You are God. You can MAKE things happen here in this world so don’t be afraid to do it.

Listen in on your characters… Slide yourself right inside your characters… See what they see. BECOME their POV. Does your character smoke? What’s it feel like when your character inhales? Does the smoke feel good deep inside your gut? Exhale. Good.

What’s your character thinking when he sees somebody shoplift a cold drink in a convenience store? Does he turn the guy in or does he mind his own business?

When your characters eat, taste the food with them. Do they like it? If not, why not?

This is YOUR movie… Sleep time is YOUR time. Make the best of it. Get to know your story so well that you can simply slip into it at a moment’s notice and experience things as your characters do — see things as your characters see them.

The closer we get to waking up from a deep sleep, our brainwave frequencies increase through the different stages of brainwave activity i.e., they increase from delta to theta — to alpha — then straight into beta when you actually wake up. During this cycle we might be able to stay in the theta state for an extra five to 15 minutes, thus giving us yet another opportunity to brainstorm our story.

Use it. It will come out in your story, trust me.

So what’s the new ground you ask? Today, my characters did something completely different in my dream… Something not in the first draft and not in the rewrite but it’s good stuff. Good enough to include and that’s your new ground. I do this all the time because it works for me… Will it work for you? Why not? You are the God of your story, aren’t you? So instead of new ground, maybe this should be, “holy ground.”

I hope you NEVER sleep the same way again…

Unk

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Friday: 6 October 2006|2113|Under Uncategorized

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4 Responses to “Dreaming on a Flukey Friday…”

  1. Spatula007 on Saturday: 7 October 2006|0840

    I was at my friend’s birthday party, and woke up in the morning with a vivid dream in my head:
    It was me in a bar, listening to a co-worker of mine telling me a story about these fictional “Zulu Cannibals”.
    There were two tribes who existed peacefully, until one day, two hunters accidentally killed a member of the opposite tribe. Ridden with guilt, they wanted to hide the body, but they didn’t know where. They hadn’t caught any game, so they made a decison; they cut up the body and returned to their village with their “prize meat”. The whole villiage ate with glee.
    Then the skeletons of the missing tribe members were discovered by the other tribe and the eldars were notified. A civil war broke out in the hunter’s tribe, when they found out. They were the smaller tribe, and they had been starving because the other tribe had been getting all the food. There were those who detested the cannibalism, and those who didn’t. It wasn’t long before the starving members of the tribe cannibalized the others, and those remanants began hunting the other tribe.
    In the end, the Zulu Cannibals disappeared- it was suspected that they ate each other in a desperate war.
    The story ends and comes back to the bar. My co-worker finishes the story with this potent line:

    “So it just goes to show, you can take man out of nature, but you can’t take nature out of man.”

    At that moment, we leave the bar, and out on the street in the middle of the city, everyone is running around killing each other and eating their flesh. Cars are on fire, and there are children eating priests, women eating babies, men eating men… even though we had advanced so far since the jungle, we were still a cannibalistic society.
    So I wrote it all down. I still want to produce the script- the cast was all in my dream, and I know all the people. I think it’d make a cool short. But that just goes to show you how inspiring dreams can be.
    Unfortunately, in my dream, I think it was shot in HD, and I can’t afford that yet.

  2. MaryAn Batchellor on Saturday: 7 October 2006|1047

    Well, I don’t care WHAT you say about dreams, I’m NOT putting on paper that my character gets chased up a tree by a bowl of pinto beans.

    Or am I…

  3. Unknown Screenwriter on Saturday: 7 October 2006|1059

    Spat,

    There’s nothing like a little cannibalism to jump-start your day… LOL.

    MaryAn,

    There might actually be something you can do with those pinto beans. Maybe a character is always eating a bowl of pinto beans? You never know how these could play a small part of a story. It might sound crazy at first and maybe you won’t use it all but maybe, through your thought process, you can tweak the pinto beans into something.

    In other words… The pinto beans are a start…

    On a side note… I grew up on pinto beans and still make a batch of them every now and then.

    Good stuff… LOL.

    Unk

  4. Dante Kleinberg on Tuesday: 10 October 2006|1312

    I don’t know if it’s arrogance on my part or what, but I’ve never been able to do those writing exercises where you write down all the characters favorite foods or what toy would they buy a toy store or what kind of smoke are they, etc.

    After I create a character, he or she already feels real to me. I already know what the character will say or do or decide when the scene presents itself, and why. I can’t bring myself to analyze them further or fill out a little Getting-to-Know-You myspace quiz.

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