Dream twists just spoil our senses of disbelief. I can see how that can be excetuted carelessly, but if done for the need of showing what the main character wants or fears most then maybe it would be the better way of involving the trope.
My story is about the issues between good-lawyer Adrian and his brother Isaac. Coming to the climax, there is a brief but painful sequence where Adrian finds Isaac has shot himself together with Adrian’s wife Noelle;
The deal with the brother characters are several issues such as Isaac’s own wife cheating and his paranoid suggestions about her ‘sneaking around at night’, whereas the tension building up with Noelle who is going through clinical depression is a subplot.
The importance is that when the dream is revealed and that it never happened, it is very well shown to the reader that from the real events of the story, Adrian is genuinely so afraid that the two people he loves very much will come together and ‘free’ themselves from their misery if he doesn’t negotiate with them first.
Should this be a good strategy?
Answer
The trope you're referring to is called All Just a Dream (tv tropes warning). While some authors can pull it off, it is usually considered a bad trope to use. The reason for this is that the "it's all just a dream" reveal is anticlimactic: there's something very dramatic happening, but then it has no consequences; the character instead gets a reset button to prevent the dramatic thing from happening in the first place. If you introduce a plot element, as a reader I would like to see that element followed through to the end, with its consequences and implications, not reset and prevented.
Another problem with this trope is that it strains the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Real dreams are weird: things happen in random order, reality shifts, and to add to the confusion - your brain flushes most of it upon awakening, so you only remember bits and pieces. Think of your own dreams: how often do they make much sense?
No comments:
Post a Comment