Last Saturday morning, lingering in the twilight state between not quite yet awake and no longer completely asleep, I suddenly realized that I was, or at least had been, dreaming of the Ray Bradbury story, “The Veldt.”
I’ve always been a Bradbury fan. Each one of his short story collections brings to mind at least one specific story:
When I think of October Country I think of “The Lake.” When I think of The Golden Apples of the Sun, it is the story, “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl” that I think of first. The Martian Chronicles always brings to mind, “There Will Come Soft Rains.” And of course, with The Illustrated Man, it is “The Veldt.”
Ah, “The Veldt.” Who can forget the first Virtual Reality nursery, the obnoxious children (IMO) and how they lured their parents into the room, . . . and how the psychologist walks in to find the children calmly sitting and drinking tea, as though they are innocent and nothing strange has happened?
There are a lot of good Bradbury stories out there, and I’m not going to claim to have read them all. Thankfully, there are more surprises in store for me. And for anyone who hasn’t read the classics I’ve listed above, I would strongly encourage you to do so. There are a lot of good stories in the books above. I was just mentioning the stories that come instantly to mind when I think of each book.
Everyone probably remembers a story that first strikes them, on that first reading of any author’s works. “The Veldt” was that story for me, with regard to Bradbury. “There Will Come Soft Rains,” is kind of special to me, but “The Veldt” stands out as being the one.
A few months back, when I was writing stories for the book, The Red Kimono, which was my first attempt at writing Sci-fi, I had started a story idea for an updated version, sort of, of “The Veldt.” It wasn’t so much an updated version, really, as it was a continuation of the story. In my story, the setting is decades after the original story/incident had taken place. And in my story I call the room a playroom instead of a nursery (which is an insignificant detail). In any case, in the story I started on, playrooms had been banned since the original, horrific incident. But now, there is a new playroom . . .
But, alas, the story I started never made it into The Red Kimono book. As often happens, I’ll be writing one story and I might think of another story, for which I then have to start a new set up (a new blank document, with the idea title and perhaps a paragraph or two) so I won’t forget the new idea. I usually have about ten to fifteen of these “starts” of stories hanging around at any one time. “The Playroom 3.0” became one of these partial stories that was just hanging there. I hadn’t given this story, or any of the other partial stories much thought after the Sci-fi book was complete. I figured I’d revisit these hanging partials, as I call them, again at some point, but for now I seemed to have moved on.
But then, I had the dream of “The Veldt.” This dream wasn’t totally just the original version, it was a mix of the two, the old story and my new one. Now, at the time of the dream, I couldn’t say that the differences in the dream actually matched up with what I had in mind for the new story when I wrote the partial. I couldn’t even remember what the start of the new story actually was. I remembered the new title I had written, but that was all. But there, on the edges of sleep, still sort of in the dream, I realized what I was dreaming about. I did manage to summon the wherewithal to hang on to the fuzzy sketch of a new ending that sprang to life in the dream. And though I didn’t jump up right away to start banging out the story; later on, I got on the laptop to see what I had written previously and then got going on it. Between the time I messed around with it on Saturday afternoon, and then again Sunday, a complete story emerged.
This was all very weird to me. I had never dreamed a story before. And really, I didn’t dream a whole, completed story now. There was just the sketchiness of a story, comingled with part of the original and maybe some of what was floating somewhere in my subconscious of my idea for the new story. But it worked.
I do know that Robert Louis Stevenson had talked of dreaming of stories. In fact, I believe it was his novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde that he claimed to have dreamed, complete. To be honest, I believe he probably meant “complete,” with regard to the idea and not story. This may seem obvious, but I’m quite sure there was a good bit of detail and correction that came later. And while other writers speak of “muses,” Stevenson also used to speak of “brownies.” I assume he didn’t mean the little girls dressed in brown uniforms, who later grow to become Girl Scouts who sell cookies door to door . . . Stevenson also sometimes spoke of “faeries,” with regard to how his stories got written. He seemed to have a lot of help. I like to stick with “muse” and refer to her at times when I speak of my own writing. Usually, I just write, thankful that the ideas are there. I don’t generally feel the need to “look a gift horse in the mouth,” as they say. And that statement, let me point out, is no reflection on my muse. Though I’ve never actually seen her, I have to believe she is quite beautiful and doesn’t in any way resemble a horse. I’m just saying, obviously, that I don’t question things; I just go with the flow.
And there are writers (and normal people, too) who keep dream journals, in which they record dreams when they first wake up. I’ve tried it before, years back, and not so much for story ideas, but just to explore what was there in my dreams, just to see what surfaced. But I never stuck with it. There are others, I suppose who do other types of things to get and keep track of ideas for stories. I generally have no problem getting ideas, as a rule, so I’ll probably just keep doing what I do. It seems to work for me. I will accept a story that comes by way of a dream, however.
So, I don’t know if I’m actually in the midst of working on another Sci-fi collection or not. But after completing the playroom story, I’ve written two or three more Sci-fi stories; and of course, I’ve still got ten or fifteen “hanging partials” that I’ve been glancing at and thinking about. One of these I’m actually working on. So maybe . . .
And I encourage you to check out the Bradbury books I listed above, and any others. The Illustrated Man was an excellent idea for stringing stories together, very cool.