8 ms·
No one cares about your dreams unless you’re a famous writer
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoWhat was that Gore Vidal quip about in the future a famous writer being like a famous ceramist?
- lmm 3y agoI don't know, what was it?
- raister 3y agoIn 1993, Vidal lamented that literature had lost its place at the center of American culture: "I said recently to a passing interviewer, 'You know, I used to be a famous novelist.' And the interviewer said, 'Oh, well, you're still very well known. People read your books.' And so I said, 'I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the category. 'Famous novelist'? The adjective is inappropriate to the noun. It's like being — 'I'm a famous ceramicist.' Well, you can be a good ceramicist. You can be a rich ceramicist. You can be much admired by other ceramicists. But you aren't famous. That's gone."
- Animats 3y agoBeing a famous novelist is mostly branding now. "Tom Clancy", "James Patterson", and "Clive Cussler" are brand names you see in big type, with the name of the actual author in small type below. Patterson has so many authors there seems to be a new Patterson book every two weeks. Clancy has been dead for years. Jaron Lanier grumbles about this. He's a musician from the hippie era, and pines for the day when being a musician was a Big Deal. Before the days of two million Myspace bands running on laptops. As for recycling your dreams, you can always use them to provide clickbait copy for ad sites. Although GPT-4 is taking over that business.
- 542354234235 3y agoMeanwhile, Stephen King is still writing and putting out 1 or 2 books a year.
- Animats 3y agoWith such low productivity, he can't dominate the New Fiction rack. Doesn't scale.
- riffraff 3y agoI never understood why some people enjoy describing their dreams. My dreams are generally pretty messy, make little sense, and are often embarrassing in some way so I don't particularly feel like sharing them. OTOH my wife will happily spend 15 minutes telling me her latest dream every time she wakes up. Turns out, according to TFA, I'm the odd one!
- camillomiller 3y agoDreams are one of the most fascinating mechanisms of the human mind. I understand the feeling of exposure, as they might well be revelation of the subconscious and unconscious mind that bypass your awake self-imposed limits and shames. For that very reason, though, your wife is doing something quite intimate when sharing them with you.
- solardev 3y agoWhy is this any more fascinating than nails growing or some hairs falling out or eyeballs moving around during sleep? Body does body things all the time. Sometimes I have incoherent thoughts while I sleep. So what? Sometimes I have them when I'm drunk or really tired or whatever too. Even when fully awake and conscious, most people (myself included) don't have the most exciting thoughts, certainly not enough to monologue about. I don't get this mysticism around sleep and dreaming. Everyone does it, and it's not particularly magical. Or intimate, for that matter. Friends share details of their dreams way too often, and I wish they wouldn't... 99% of the time it just sounds like the mind "metabolizing", I don't need to know what happened, much less sit down with some silly book to randomly assign meanings and weights to every minute of it. It's like some people believe the dreams are a portal to a higher consciousness. But frankly they just sound like noise.
- alexvoda 3y agoI agree with your 3rd and 4th paragraph. However, I argue that that your first sentence frames things poorly. Nails growing, hairs falling, the body doing body things is fascinating. Are dreams exceptional compared to other behaviours of the body? No. Are they fascinating? Yes. Are many people disproportionately obsessed with them? Also yes.
- jmugan 3y agoI love dreams, but I hate when dreams are shown in movies or characters describe them in books. I just skim until reality resumes. Dream interludes almost never offer insight and are just boring.
- graphe 3y agoI agree with you. The only good dream sequences I remember are from dharma and greg, they act like my dreams. https://youtu.be/-on07_-ixTI https://youtu.be/-on07_-ixTI
- cm2012 3y agoIn movies dreams are usually the most insightful. It's just insightful to the characters state of mind, not the nuts and bolts of plot progression.
- jmugan 3y agoTrue. But they never seem to convey more than "character X is worried about potential event Y."
- solardev 3y ago"Character dreams about X" is just a cheap cop out. Real people anxious about things show that stress in many ways, and aren't always able to just direct it into a single coherent dream that gives them sudden illumination. It just comes across as lazy writing...
- tayo42 3y agoYou should check out the comic series sandman. Or the first season of it on Netflix. The whole thing is about dreaming.
- officehero 3y agoDreams are just stories. Through the lense of the audience they undergo the same critical scrutiny as any other story. It's not good enough to put a stamp 'dream' on a story that doesn't make sense and think the audience will be ok with it. IMO dreams are good in novella format where the line between reality and fiction is blurred out, like the work by Jorge Luis Borges.
- graphe 3y agoI disagree. For those who enjoy random people's dreams. https://old.reddit.com/r/thomastheplankengine/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thomastheplankengine/
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoWhile the subreddit is great, I think the original article still holds true for normal conversation. Your average person does not give a single shit about your dream and vice versa. Its value as a conversational tool is low and should be probably avoided unless specifically someone asks about your dream. The average person should probably never share their own dream unsolicited because there is a high chance it will add no value to the conversation whatsoever. I don’t know if I agree with the article in that somehow these creative minds have more special dreams either. I just know that layman’s dreams, including my own, almost always bore me to tears and aren’t the parable or allegory we might think they are, if even that I might sound slightly bitter but I’ve had literally hundreds of conversations over my lifetime hearing people sharing their dreams and I can easily count on one hand the amount of times that a productive or interesting conversation has emerged as a result.
- graphe 3y agoThat's the opposite with me! I just talked to my friend (yesterday) about his dream with a marriage and a child and how he met his feral girlfriend. He said he felt like he lived through a whole lifetime and we talked about dreams like that and how we could get more "inception" dreams where we live our lives and need psychedelic integration before coming back to our own dreary lives. I talked about the science of dreams and theories of them too and try to interpret it. I always do dream interpretation too and it's fun to think of where those thoughts came from. It's just another way of thinking of dreams.
- dclowd9901 3y agoOne of my favorite things I’ve ever heard was a creative writing professor in college would tell us “nobody cares about your dog.” Granted that’s probably not completely true, the idea was more about not assuming just because you care about a character, your audience will. You have to get them to buy into the character. Just a memory I had thinking about this article.
- josephg 3y agoNobody really cares about anything unless it’s part of a story they’re engaged with. Dreams are no different. Eg: “In my dream last night I was big and went around eating buildings. I was angry for some reason” - boring. Vs: “I work in a supermarket and I hate it. Last night I dreamed I was Godzilla, and I went to the supermarket I work at and reached my hand down and ate the supermarket whole. I could feel my coworkers still screaming in my belly, but I was still hungry”. More engaging right? It’s engaging because there’s story in it. It has relationship. Point of view. Tension. It’s got nothing to with being famous. It’s all to do with being interesting. Dreams usually need to be digested a bit before they make good stories. They come out too wild. Too raw for popular consumption. Taming that (just enough) is the essence of good storytelling.
- Kiro 3y agoI don't feel your second version is more engaging. I think it's the fact that dreams are just "made up" and it's the same thing as if you would say "I was thinking that I was Godzilla". No-no would want to listen to that.
- josephg 3y ago> No-no would want to listen to that. Nobody would want to listen to made up stories? Nobody? Thousands of years of fiction would like a word.
- Kiro 3y agoYes, nobody. For every random made-up thought someone actually wants to hear there are millions of stories not a single person is interested in. Dreams are mostly the latter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chki 3y agoNothing is as boring as other people's dreams – unless you are part of their dream, then they become really interesting.
- DonHopkins 3y agoON THE SOUL: Ed Fredkin, Unpublished Manuscript http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/... >The John Cocke Theory of Dreams was told to me, on the phone, late one night back in the early 1960’s. John’s complete description was contained in a very short conversation approximately as follows: >“Hey Ed. You know about optimal encoding, right?” >“Yup.” >“Say the way we remember things is using a lossy optimal encoding scheme; you’d get efficient use of memory, huh?” >“Uh huh.” “Well the decoding could take into account recent memories and sensory inputs, like sounds being heard, right?” >“Sure!” >“Well, if when you’re asleep, the decoder is decoding random bits (digital noise) mixed in with a few sensory inputs and taking into account recent memories and stuff like that, the output of the decoder would be a dream; huh?” >I was stunned. Ed Fredkin Talks About John Cocke - 4 May 1990: Theory of Dreams https://youtu.be/DLCb1UV5bzU?t=1119 https://youtu.be/DLCb1UV5bzU?t=1119
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]