Post by Bannanachair on Sept 9, 2018 11:22:53 GMT -4
I've been using dreams as a plot and foreshadowing device since Land of Ferinox, and I have come to rather enjoy writing them. Much more recently I wrote three dream sequences in Fantasy RP, one for each PC, and unlike Land of Ferinox where I was just bullshitting and hoping to make the prophetic dreams come true later somehow this time I definitively know what should be taken from each dream, what's prophetic and what's just dream weirdness, and what any symbolism in the dreams themselves means. In fact, all three dreams relate specifically to events that either are already occurring, have occurred or that will occur very soon.
Othan's Dream:
As you drift off to sleep, you have a peculiar dream. The dream is of you and your family: You begin running with Northan down a dark hallway in a castle that you've never been to before. The man chasing you is of the same foreign ethnicity that Raethus is half of and that is evident in his father Wyst: Cavelander, maybe Riftlander. The man has a cut down his jaw, and Northan's sword was covered in blood. Was it Northan who cut the man? The man managed to catch up to you and sliced Northan, and then you fell.
You fell into a court led by Kallian. You couldn't figure out the words that he was saying, but when he saw you, you were suddenly just before his throne, Kallian with a knife in his hand, as he was stabbing at you.
"Help!" Shouted Northan's voice from afar. Where was he?
You fell again into the middle of a battle in a storm. This was wrong, you shouldn't be in the midst of the fighting, you're a strategist. By the time you got your bearing you noticed what appeared to be a draconic figure fighting against the storm, with laughter cackling all around you in the place of thunder. Darrien Gast was at the head of the opposing army, and he sighted you and charged straight at you, seemingly cured of his limp.
"Help!" Shouted Northan's voice yet again, and once again the scene shifted. A sickhouse, where Horthon lay dying and where your father lay dying and where your son lay dying, each of different ailments: Horthon dying of disease, Earl Thander dying of age and Thander Marthus dying of injuries.
"Help!' Shouted Northan's voice, but he couldn't be shouting at you, the man with the bloody red gape in his face killed him years ago. You're in Nargon, with Laia and her children in stocks being humiliated by the public, and her husband's bastard son chained to a throne being carried by common people.
"Help!" Shouted the now familiar voice of a dead man as you saw your daughters, both fully grown, in slavery, being raped by dozens of men. Ielle's breast was cut and both girls were screaming as their captors had their way with them.
HELP! Shouted a voice, and suddenly you were back in the castle you were first in, kneeling over Northan's lifeless form. He darted up and, still wounded, spoke several more words. HELP ME BACK HOME.
A cold hand was placed upon your shoulder from behind, a bony hand bare of flesh sending a chill down your spine, and you awoke in a sweat. Thalla was lying in her slip next to you in your bed. Looking out your window, you suppose that you probably have half an hour before the sun rises.
Alfred's Dream:
You drift off into a slumber and dream of a storm, but you're sailing on an open sea this time and the waves are even worse than what you've experienced while awake. The waves keep crashing against you with the constant cacophony of thunder around you, but the strikes of lightning and the clouds seem to be making a face. You're distracted for a moment, staring into the eyes that the storm has, then a wave crashes into you and throws you overboard. You can hear the thunder laugh at you as you drown...
You're woken up hours later by the sounds of a heated argument.
"We have to make for port to repair the damages! We can't keep sailing like this!" Said the voice of one of your crew members.
"The storm's nearly died down completely, it's just a drizzle. We were paid to sail to Estermere, dammit, we'll sail to Estermere!" Shouted Garry's voice. The man's nothing if not stubborn.
Jonos's Dream:
You're directed to a room that seems to have been inhabited by one of the daughters or nieces of Darmen var Norbury, and likely a favoured child given the softness of the bed and the level of decoration in the room. Most of the other bedrooms, especially of the male heirs, were being used for storage during the siege.
You fall asleep almost immediately, and suddenly you're at dinner as a child conversing with your sister, waiting for your father to arrive from some matter of court or another. Daela looks to have been nine, and you must have been seven. You can hear Daela's words, and you know that they're in the Elusian language, but you can't make sense of what the sounds mean.
The wooden door is opened, and a man steps through. He has your family's distinctive emerald-green eyes, but he is not your father. He looks like he could be your long lost and more unruly brother, in fact, with his tall, athletic frame and his unkempt beard and hair. You recognise him from family portraits that you've seen, however, as your ancestor and not your brother: Balon Dawburn, the only trueborn son of Ramsey Dawburn to have any children.
He dies, full of arrows to his back, and another man comes to take his place. Morm Dawburn walked in then, standing on his father's corpse. He looked around the room for a minute, and then his head fell off, shattering into a million pieces like porcelain upon hitting the ground.
The man to walk in next was initially unrecognizable to you, until his eye rolled out of his skull and his legs vanished from underneath him. Upon that happening, you immediately recognized him as Ayvon, your parents' grandfather. "You're trying to reunite my father's grandfather's lands," He said, looking at you with his one remaining eye. "I shouldn't have tried. I told my sons not to try, and Gareth told his sons not to try. And yet you try anyway. You'll end up just like me, you know?" He aged continually throughout his speech, until eventually he also died in middle age.
Your father walked in then, looking as he did over twenty years ago and yet still older than any of the three corpses on the ground were when they died. Without saying a word, he grabbed your sister and dragged her away from you, to marry her off to some minor foreign nobleman. You'll never see her again if you let him do that, you know, and yet it transpires all the same.
Then you wake up. The sunlight beams through the windows, and at first you think that you barely slept at all. Then it occurs to you that it's sunrise, not sunset, and the next day.
Does anyone else here enjoy using dreams as plot devices, either in roleplays or in other writing? Do you have any examples of you using dreams that you particularly enjoyed, or of others using dreams that you particularly enjoyed? On the other hand, do you guys just completely hate dreams as a whole and try to avoid using them as narrative devices?
Othan's Dream:
As you drift off to sleep, you have a peculiar dream. The dream is of you and your family: You begin running with Northan down a dark hallway in a castle that you've never been to before. The man chasing you is of the same foreign ethnicity that Raethus is half of and that is evident in his father Wyst: Cavelander, maybe Riftlander. The man has a cut down his jaw, and Northan's sword was covered in blood. Was it Northan who cut the man? The man managed to catch up to you and sliced Northan, and then you fell.
You fell into a court led by Kallian. You couldn't figure out the words that he was saying, but when he saw you, you were suddenly just before his throne, Kallian with a knife in his hand, as he was stabbing at you.
"Help!" Shouted Northan's voice from afar. Where was he?
You fell again into the middle of a battle in a storm. This was wrong, you shouldn't be in the midst of the fighting, you're a strategist. By the time you got your bearing you noticed what appeared to be a draconic figure fighting against the storm, with laughter cackling all around you in the place of thunder. Darrien Gast was at the head of the opposing army, and he sighted you and charged straight at you, seemingly cured of his limp.
"Help!" Shouted Northan's voice yet again, and once again the scene shifted. A sickhouse, where Horthon lay dying and where your father lay dying and where your son lay dying, each of different ailments: Horthon dying of disease, Earl Thander dying of age and Thander Marthus dying of injuries.
"Help!' Shouted Northan's voice, but he couldn't be shouting at you, the man with the bloody red gape in his face killed him years ago. You're in Nargon, with Laia and her children in stocks being humiliated by the public, and her husband's bastard son chained to a throne being carried by common people.
"Help!" Shouted the now familiar voice of a dead man as you saw your daughters, both fully grown, in slavery, being raped by dozens of men. Ielle's breast was cut and both girls were screaming as their captors had their way with them.
HELP! Shouted a voice, and suddenly you were back in the castle you were first in, kneeling over Northan's lifeless form. He darted up and, still wounded, spoke several more words. HELP ME BACK HOME.
A cold hand was placed upon your shoulder from behind, a bony hand bare of flesh sending a chill down your spine, and you awoke in a sweat. Thalla was lying in her slip next to you in your bed. Looking out your window, you suppose that you probably have half an hour before the sun rises.
Alfred's Dream:
You drift off into a slumber and dream of a storm, but you're sailing on an open sea this time and the waves are even worse than what you've experienced while awake. The waves keep crashing against you with the constant cacophony of thunder around you, but the strikes of lightning and the clouds seem to be making a face. You're distracted for a moment, staring into the eyes that the storm has, then a wave crashes into you and throws you overboard. You can hear the thunder laugh at you as you drown...
You're woken up hours later by the sounds of a heated argument.
"We have to make for port to repair the damages! We can't keep sailing like this!" Said the voice of one of your crew members.
"The storm's nearly died down completely, it's just a drizzle. We were paid to sail to Estermere, dammit, we'll sail to Estermere!" Shouted Garry's voice. The man's nothing if not stubborn.
Jonos's Dream:
You're directed to a room that seems to have been inhabited by one of the daughters or nieces of Darmen var Norbury, and likely a favoured child given the softness of the bed and the level of decoration in the room. Most of the other bedrooms, especially of the male heirs, were being used for storage during the siege.
You fall asleep almost immediately, and suddenly you're at dinner as a child conversing with your sister, waiting for your father to arrive from some matter of court or another. Daela looks to have been nine, and you must have been seven. You can hear Daela's words, and you know that they're in the Elusian language, but you can't make sense of what the sounds mean.
The wooden door is opened, and a man steps through. He has your family's distinctive emerald-green eyes, but he is not your father. He looks like he could be your long lost and more unruly brother, in fact, with his tall, athletic frame and his unkempt beard and hair. You recognise him from family portraits that you've seen, however, as your ancestor and not your brother: Balon Dawburn, the only trueborn son of Ramsey Dawburn to have any children.
He dies, full of arrows to his back, and another man comes to take his place. Morm Dawburn walked in then, standing on his father's corpse. He looked around the room for a minute, and then his head fell off, shattering into a million pieces like porcelain upon hitting the ground.
The man to walk in next was initially unrecognizable to you, until his eye rolled out of his skull and his legs vanished from underneath him. Upon that happening, you immediately recognized him as Ayvon, your parents' grandfather. "You're trying to reunite my father's grandfather's lands," He said, looking at you with his one remaining eye. "I shouldn't have tried. I told my sons not to try, and Gareth told his sons not to try. And yet you try anyway. You'll end up just like me, you know?" He aged continually throughout his speech, until eventually he also died in middle age.
Your father walked in then, looking as he did over twenty years ago and yet still older than any of the three corpses on the ground were when they died. Without saying a word, he grabbed your sister and dragged her away from you, to marry her off to some minor foreign nobleman. You'll never see her again if you let him do that, you know, and yet it transpires all the same.
Then you wake up. The sunlight beams through the windows, and at first you think that you barely slept at all. Then it occurs to you that it's sunrise, not sunset, and the next day.
Does anyone else here enjoy using dreams as plot devices, either in roleplays or in other writing? Do you have any examples of you using dreams that you particularly enjoyed, or of others using dreams that you particularly enjoyed? On the other hand, do you guys just completely hate dreams as a whole and try to avoid using them as narrative devices?