I have a project I'm doing something similar with (taking inspiration from Yume Nikki and 1001 Nights... sort of) so this is a useful thread for me as well. I've found the World Dream Bank to be a really helpful source of inspiration!
This may be more of my personal style, but I think two things that make me feel like I've written a successful dream are when I manage to capture a very specific mood or feeling in the plot and setting, and when I manage to come up with something Mind Screw-y in an interesting and coherent way. I'm fascinated with interobjects - dream constructs that are identifiable as two different things from a specific category at the same time, especially when the category isn't a group you'd think to identify beforehand (e.g. a phone which is also an infant, in a category something like "things that feel the same to deal with when they make disruptive noises and don't belong to you"). Or divided consciousness dreams; I've had one I was the protagonist of a film I was also watching, and film-me was unaware of being fictional and reacted realistically in-character, while audience-me thought it was one of the worst movies I'd ever seen. :P Sleeping brains are not bound to their waking thought patterns, and the way they connect or disconnect ideas in defiance of habits or conventions is a useful process to explore something in a different light.
I have a project I'm doing something similar with (taking inspiration from Yume Nikki and 1001 Nights... sort of) so this is a useful thread for me as well. I've found the World Dream Bank
to be a really helpful source of inspiration!
This may be more of my personal style, but I think two things that make me feel like I've written a successful dream are when I manage to capture a very specific mood or feeling in the plot and setting, and when I manage to come up with something Mind Screw-y in an interesting and coherent way. I'm fascinated with interobjects - dream constructs that are identifiable as two different things from a specific category at the same time, especially when the category isn't a group you'd think to identify beforehand (e.g. a phone which is also an infant, in a category something like "things that feel the same to deal with when they make disruptive noises and don't belong to you"). Or divided consciousness dreams; I've had one I was the protagonist of a film I was also watching, and film-me was unaware of being fictional and reacted realistically in-character, while audience-me thought it was one of the worst movies I'd ever seen. :P Sleeping brains are not bound to their waking thought patterns, and the way they connect or disconnect ideas in defiance of habits or conventions is a useful process to explore something in a different light.
The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable