Ch5 of Tribulations
Mar. 27th, 2009 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaChapter Five, (Stupid) Things, of Tribulations is up.
Let the confusion begin.
(I kid, I kid. Don't bother to line up a timeline here - the dating is to give a general idea of when it takes place and, in the case of subplots, so you know which piece came first.)
Something random - I heard an interesting point about magical realism, which was that there's a lot of otherwise completely realistic stories that contain prophetic dreams. This, to me, meant two things: one, that's not because people think it's a good use of magical realism but because a lot of people believe prophetic dreams are real and don't see including them in their story as any violation of realism, and two, this had never occurred to me as an option, because I don't even believe dreams are symbolic in the generally accepted sense. (Ie, if I have a nightmare about a lot of forgotten animals in cages starving to death, this isn't a metaphor for anything more complex than that I live in fear of this happening. Dreams: not actually that hard to work out.)
What's kind of odd about this is that I'm largely writing fanfic in what's more or less a fantasy universe, sometimes complete with real magic, yet any time I include dreams having any more meaning than the rambles of an unconscious mind, I have to have some idea of why things are different, because meaningful dreams aren't normal and must have some explanation. They're also generally exceptions to the rule, because the idea of saying that this is how the world works in this particular story just makes me start working on all the ways society would change if dreams really did have meaning, what with them totally not having any meaning in the real world.
All this said, here bedragons Meaningful Dreams. And it occurs to me that a large part of this is that I don't believe in meaningful dreams, and so their presence is a lot more horrible to me than the average person. People are dreaming dreams and seeing visions and knowing things they shouldn't because reality has started to break down.
The dreams, correspondingly, are decoupled from chronological events.
The LB books are a lot more coy about this, which is to say boring and tiresome. The dreams don't show up until significantly later on and, as I recall, are pretty much never relevant but more about how awesome it is to be in the presence of God. I got the distinct impression the authors didn't even think of them until later books, though it's hard to say with hacks - they often just seem to throw in stuff completely at random, then pick up the thread and say it was really something different later. I may actually include their representation to - the quote they use, after all, is about old men and young men, while my story concerns itself more with women and children.
Let the confusion begin.
(I kid, I kid. Don't bother to line up a timeline here - the dating is to give a general idea of when it takes place and, in the case of subplots, so you know which piece came first.)
Something random - I heard an interesting point about magical realism, which was that there's a lot of otherwise completely realistic stories that contain prophetic dreams. This, to me, meant two things: one, that's not because people think it's a good use of magical realism but because a lot of people believe prophetic dreams are real and don't see including them in their story as any violation of realism, and two, this had never occurred to me as an option, because I don't even believe dreams are symbolic in the generally accepted sense. (Ie, if I have a nightmare about a lot of forgotten animals in cages starving to death, this isn't a metaphor for anything more complex than that I live in fear of this happening. Dreams: not actually that hard to work out.)
What's kind of odd about this is that I'm largely writing fanfic in what's more or less a fantasy universe, sometimes complete with real magic, yet any time I include dreams having any more meaning than the rambles of an unconscious mind, I have to have some idea of why things are different, because meaningful dreams aren't normal and must have some explanation. They're also generally exceptions to the rule, because the idea of saying that this is how the world works in this particular story just makes me start working on all the ways society would change if dreams really did have meaning, what with them totally not having any meaning in the real world.
All this said, here be
The dreams, correspondingly, are decoupled from chronological events.
The LB books are a lot more coy about this, which is to say boring and tiresome. The dreams don't show up until significantly later on and, as I recall, are pretty much never relevant but more about how awesome it is to be in the presence of God. I got the distinct impression the authors didn't even think of them until later books, though it's hard to say with hacks - they often just seem to throw in stuff completely at random, then pick up the thread and say it was really something different later. I may actually include their representation to - the quote they use, after all, is about old men and young men, while my story concerns itself more with women and children.
