When Characters Sleep (Perchance to Dream)
When I was first preparing my short story collection to send to publishers, I was self-conscious that I’d broken a writerly rule: 3 of the 12 stories start with the viewpoint character waking up. And even worse, some would say: two of those include the dream the character was having right before they did. I wasted a good amount of time trying to “fix” those stories to avoid this, but quickly realized those adjustments hurt the stories rather than helping them. That rule is still a decent one to follow, but in these stories, the moment of waking really was the right place to jump in.
Granted, that collection still hasn't been picked up by a publisher, so maybe that is a bigger problem than I want to think. But all 3 stories that start with wake-ups have been published, so some editor at least thinks they passed muster. And I'm far from the only writer who includes dreams and sleeping in my work. The collection I'm currently reading has dream right on the tin (Adam Dove's Everyone! In the Dream! is You!) and makes use of dreams at multiple points. You can even find examples in the canon—maybe most famously Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, which opens on Gregor Samsa waking as a beetle.
Which all leads me to wonder: Why are writers advised not to feature dreams or start stories with wake-ups, and what are the “right” and “wrong” ways to employ them in fiction?
The dos and don'ts of wake-up starts
Something I know all too well from reading submissions for After Happy Hour: a lot of writers start their stories too early. I'm guilty of this too on my first drafts. I think it's a natural problem for seat-of-the-pants writers like myself. Since I don't plot things out in advance, I often need to write my way through the story for a bit before I figure out where it's going. This often means my first few pages of a rough draft are a bit rambling and wandery, and I frequently end up cutting down to the story's real start, which comes a few pages in, once I'm in the editing stage.
This is, I think, the primary issue with most stories that start on a character waking up. That's simply earlier in the narrative than the reader needs to see, especially if the inciting action doesn't happen until later in the character's day. If the story really gets going when an unexpected visitor shows up while your character drinks their morning coffee, that arrival should open the story—not the character's wake-up routine leading up to it.
Morning routines, typically, are mundane, slow-paced things. They involve everyday activities and details: yawning, stretching, showering, getting dressed, and similar things that readers don't need to see the characters doing. Often, I think writers sense that there isn't enough going on during these moments, and use these quotidian behaviors as an opportunity for the character to contemplate their current circumstances or the conflict they're facing. Unfortunately, this just doubles down on the problem, resulting in a story that starts with both a routine wake-up and a chunk of info-dumped backstory.
Another aspect of this problem, I think, is that waking up feels like too familiar of a place to start. You can find a lot of examples of stories that begin on a character waking up. It's also just baked into our human rhythms. Our daily stories start with waking. This can lead to it feeling overdone and cliche—particularly for people like professors and editors, who see a lot of stories-in-progress that aren't quite ready for publication yet, which is often because they have a slow opening that starts too far before the inciting action.
Where I think the real issue lies here is in a phrase I used a couple paragraphs up: “a routine wake-up.” If the day starts the way it usually does for the character, with no inherent tension, change, or conflict, then that's not a scene that's likely to hook a reader, and that makes it a poor choice for a story opening. In short fiction especially, you ideally want the reader to feel invested from the very first sentence. There might be things you can learn about a character from how they start their day—whether they're up right away or hit snooze, how rested they feel, whether they remember their dreams, the first thing they think about, etc—so these scenes can be productive to write. That doesn't mean they need to be in the final version of the story that the reader sees, though, and if the waking up is a slow, normal, familiar process, it needs to be trimmed out during edits.
On the flip side of this, you can also use that as a standard for what wake-ups might be effective: when there is conflict, tension, or mystery baked into that moment. For instance, if the character:
- Wakes up disoriented, doesn't know where they are, or doesn't remember getting there
- Wakes up to an unusual place or situation (especially if also combined with the above)
- Is woken up unexpectedly by an argument, emergency, or other potentially dangerous or conflict-riddled situation
- Immediately faces conflict or tension that serves as the inciting incident of the story
This is why The Metamorphosis still works. That opening actually hits all those bullet points: Gregor Samsa wakes up disoriented in an unusual situation (he is now a bug), which is definitely an emergency and serves as the driving tension throughout the piece.
The dos and don'ts of dream sequences
If your characters are human (and even most of them that aren't), they're going to sleep at some point. You do want to acknowledge this as a writer—it's unrealistic if your characters face constant action for 30 hours straight with no mention of needing to rest. That being said, sleep is such a natural thing for people to do that we just kind of assume it happens in the off-page parts of a story. If scene 1 happens on Thursday and scene 2 is on Friday, I don't assume the character just sat up all night staring at a wall—obviously they slept in the white space between scenes, just like that's when they do things like going to the bathroom and all the other boring, normal things people do on a daily basis.
Dream sequences can be a way to show the reader what the character's doing while they sleep, but they should never exist solely for this reason, because of what I said above: it's not necessary. In fact, even in many cases where a dream is relevant to a story, it often doesn't need to be shown fully in-scene. A brief summary of the salient points in narrative or dialogue, dropped in while the character is doing other active things to move the story forward, is often a better approach. This is particularly true in short fiction, where you don't have a ton of words to work with and need to make every one count.
Summary also spares you the need to actually write the dream happening, which is a good thing because dreams are incredibly difficult to capture well on the page. The very nature of a dream breaks most of the rules of good storytelling: they lack internal logic, break the established rules of reality, and the events in them often have no clear progression of cause-and-effect. Trying to convey this too accurately can leave a reader completely confused and mired by chaos, but if you impose too much order, it loses the key qualities that make it feel like a dream.
But dreams can also be useful tools. They can give readers an insight into a character's subconscious, serving as a way to make connections or uncover hidden desires, fears, and motivations. This can drive character epiphanies that move the plot forward or enhance the emotional arc, which can give dreams a functional purpose. The surreal aspects of a dream can be useful, too, adding an element of the fantastic to an otherwise realistic story. It's a space where flowery descriptions and figurative language naturally fit, giving the writer freedom to play with imagery in new ways.
One side note: I'm mostly talking about using dreams in realistic stories here. For speculative writers there can be a whole other array of functional purposes to dreams. If you have lucid dreamers who control their dreamspace, then the dreamworld basically becomes another setting in your story—in the Wheel of Time books, for example, I would argue that the scenes that happen in the World of Dreams aren't actually dream sequences in the traditional sense. There is also the in-between concept of prophetic dreams, or people communicating with each other through dreams. While you still want to capture a dream-like feel in those moments, those scenes also have an inherent functional purpose and tension that pushes them closer to waking reality in terms of how you approach them as a writer.
These more speculative situations aside, though, I think there are a few situations in which dream sequences can be effective:
- When the character has repressed memories, unhealed traumas, or other internal conflicts that would be difficult to convey in an interesting way through narrative or backstory
- When you want to distort the reader's sense of reality without directly introducing speculative elements
- To show a character obsessing or dwelling over a conflict, event, conversation, etc. from their waking life
- To make revelations or introduce foreshadowing about the plot or characters in a slant way that maintains some mystery or uncertainty around them
- To reinforce symbolism or metaphor that is thematically important for the story
I doubt this is a complete list, but these are all situations in which I could see a dream sequence being the most effective way to accomplish what the story needs. That said, even within these situations, I think there are a couple of rules for using dreams:
- They shouldn't feel like a “gotcha” or an intentional attempt to trick the reader. These are the dreams that are most likely to piss off readers because it leaves them feeling cheated and lied to—and, yes, all fiction is technically an elaborate lie, but readers want to feel like they're “in on the joke”, as it were. Deceptive dreams like this end up feeling gimmicky, like a cheap attempt to build un-earned tension. A particularly offensive version of this is the “It was all a dream...” ending, which is essentially a cop-out way for a writer to avoid actually writing a conclusion.
- They should have some impact on the plot or characters after they're over. Maybe the dream leads your character to a revelation, for instance, or makes them second-guess a decision that has bearing on the plot. Even though the dream happens in a separate reality, it needs to feel linked to the waking reality so the reader feels like there was a reason for them to read it.
- They should make sense for the character. A dream landscape is one that takes place entirely inside your character's head, and this means every detail you show is a chance to tell the reader something about that character. It should feel consistent to how you've established them in waking life, both in terms of the settings, people, and things they see, and in the way they navigate through that dreamscape. Similarly, their response to the dream should align with their character—if they're shown as highly skeptical and rational, it doesn't make sense for them to immediately change their decision on something because they had a dream about it.
Sleeping and dreaming in fiction
As humans, sleep is one of the main ways we give shape to time. Anyone who's ever pulled an all-nighter, or worked a third-shift job, knows how shifting your sleeping patterns can fuck with your sense of time and how you define what a “day” even means. That can be a useful device for fiction writers, too, but like any aspect of storytelling, it's something you want to use with intention.
In other words, the standard storytelling wisdom here is mostly right, if perhaps a bit restrictive. Dreams absolutely can work in stories, as can starting a story with a character waking up, but you want to think critically about these devices before you use them to make sure they’re really the best fit for your story.
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