Writing a Screenplay

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
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Hello Everyone!

Back in 2009 I joined this forum to begin my quest for lucid dreaming. I never posted anything and only stayed a lurker on the forums for a couple of months. I was 16 and was so fascinated by the concept of ludic dreaming.

Since then, I have never been able to stop thinking about lucidity. I have had a few successful lucid dreams, but I never was a hardcore lucid dreamer. I didn’t keep a dream journal every single night, I didn’t to RCs every day. I was more interested in the concept, than putting in the work to do it. Shallow, I know, but it gave me a lot of knowledge and a sort of passion.

Anyways, on to the point. I’m a filmmaker and working on a screenplay at the moment involving lucid dreaming pretty heavily. I’m not going to go into many details, but it’s about a graphic designer who gets a job from a website like yours to create a web banner and some other graphics. While doing research on the site he becomes interested in lucid dreaming. Him and his girlfriend both start a quest to become lucid together. That’s all I’m going to say for now, but I wanted to get your opinions on some things:

First of all, I know you can use dreams to overcome certain fears. Have any of you had this experience? I would love to know some of the more common fears, not necessarily ones you’ve overcome, but ones dreamers have. Is it self-esteem issues? Rejection? Abandonment? Failure? Adventure? Etc. etc.

Secondly, do you think it’s possible to lose sight of what’s real and whats not if you’re not careful? I remember when I was trying lucid dreaming at first, I had been doing so much research on lucidity that i was starting to simply dream about lucid dreaming. This led me to think I was dreaming lucidly, but I really didn’t have any control over the dream when looking back on it. So do you think there’s the possibility that if you feel like you don’t have control over your real life, but do in your dreams, your brain might start swapping reality for the dream? Typically, you have control of your real life, but not your dreams.

Thirdly, if you could point me to some good threads on using drugs in your dreams. Not taking drugs, then going to sleep, but finding drugs in your lucid dream and the affect they have on the dream.

I would like to keep you guys in the loop a bit on this script, because I respect your community deeply. I don’t want to do something that will shed negative light on the LD community.

Also, I know some of these are broad topics and I’m not trying to be spoon fed. I will spend quite a bit of time searching through the forums, I just wanted to let you guys know about the project and how much i respect your community. Hopefully, I can become more active now.

-Tyler Herron

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Hello Tyler, I’m thrilled to hear you’re writing such a screenplay! Lucid dreaming is a fascinating subject and one that I think people would benefit from exploring/being exposed to more. Making art about it is a great way to do this, so I fully support you.

On to your questions, though:

The first I can’t speak much to as I haven’t used lucid dreams to combat fears in the way I think you mean.

Your second question is one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about myself. Although I think it’s different for everyone, as certain people are more “grounded” than others, I definitely think it is possible for some lucid dreamers to start to question what is reality and what is a dream. The more vivid one’s dreams become, the more easily one may substitute them for reality.
I think the more important aspect of this issue is not that a lucid dreamer would start to unknowingly confuse waking and dreaming life, but that one would start to prefer dreams to reality. Since we theoretically have near complete control over our lucid dreams, they can be much more comforting than the unyielding and often harsh world of wakefulness. Lucid dreams can be an escape, and an extremely effective one at that. Did your lover just leave you? You can make up another one in a dream. Having difficulties as work? You can imagine yourself as successful as you want while dreaming. Not to say that using dreams to relieve stress is a bad thing, but a lucid dreamer has to be careful to realize that what he/she builds in a dream does not transfer to reality.

As for the drug question: drugs in dreams can have whatever effect you want them to. Literally whatever effect you want the drug to have, you just have to tell yourself that’s what’s going to happen. You could imagine a familiar drug, one that you’ve taken in real life, or it could be something completely different. It’s really only limited by your imagination.

Hope that helped! Lemme know if you need any clarification on my answers. I’m very excited to see what comes of all this. :smile:

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Thanks Yves! I’m glad you support my project! :smile: I was scared people would dismiss it. I come from the film world, where that happens a lot…

Thanks so much for your input! You made a great point on question #2. I do agree that one could start to prefer the dream, as even I tend to prefer my dreams over real life sometimes…

I guess a lot of my questions on this particular character boil down to control. The secondary character doesn’t have a lot of control over his mind in the first place, so sometimes he goes to some scary places. I don’t know if that makes sense or not. I know that sometimes in my life it feels like I don’t really have control over my mind’s thoughts, but I do have control over my actions in waking life. Which, when I was younger, led my dreams to be a little darker.

The primary character on the other hand, does have control. Sort of. She uses lucid dreaming to deal with a lot of issues in her life, and ultimately becomes a better person by getting out of the emotionally controlling relationship she’s in. That’s why I was asking about fears.

I’m trying to be very careful in the writing of this screenplay, because I know not many people know about lucid dreaming. Of course, I’m just an indie filmmaker, so this isn’t going to be showing in 1000 theatres across the US, but who knows, right?

Lucid dreaming is not the main character in this feature, it’s a tool that two people use. One becomes much a better person, and the other one, well, doesn’t. What I don’t want people to see is someone being destroyed by lucid dreaming, but how one can use lucid dreaming to become something better. And I want to show them that by showing them the two extremes. Does that make sense?

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Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. Like anything, you can’t abuse lucid dreaming or you’ll end up with more trouble than you came to it with. Cautionary tales like this are good because they’re real: the message you’re trying to convey is a true one, I think. As long as you show both sides then you’ll do the subject justice.

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It sounds like The Last 5 Years meets Inception, both of which I very much enjoyed.

Cool idea! Do let us know if you want free coverage once you’re done.

As for fears… It’d really depend on the characters. I suppose that I had a fear of–not adventure, but the unknown, symbolized by a swimming pool with black water that had melted waxworks pop out and attack me.

I also had self-esteem issues, more an inconvenience in the lucid dream than a fear, because I was walking around about eight feet tall and I couldn’t shrink myself down to an acceptable size.

One of my first posts on this forum, I talked about how I confused nonlucid dreams with reality when I was much younger. Another poster replied with a similar story of how they dreamed of learning how to breathe underwater, and then tried it at the swimming pool in waking life… which, of course, failed, although it sounds very lucky that this dreamer had friends to demonstrate this to and be embarrassed and confused-- but alive!

As a fan of the paranormal, metaphysical, woo-woo New Age stuff… I do take the significance of dreams perhaps more seriously than the average lucid dreamer. However, I take care that I do as little harm to others and myself as humanely possible while pursuing my dreams.

I suppose that drugs in dreams would have the same effect as food in dreams. They could make you taller, make you smaller, taste differently than they look, or not make anything different at all.

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Thanks everyone for the input. I’m still working very hard on this screenplay while also working on several other films with my company.

It’s been a slow process. I’ve been working on it for almost 3 1/2 years now. I’ll try to keep you updated on the progress and continue asking questions as time goes on. As of right now I’m hoping to have the screenplay finished by June 2014 or so.

I like the comparison between The Last 5 Years and Inception. Inception is most definitely a huge inspiration to the project. Another inspiration I’ve had is The Fountain with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Wiess. The Last 5 Years is such a good show, and I wish I could see it live one day.

I think everything you’ve said so far as fallen in line with the things I’ve been writing so that’s encouraging to me. The script has taken a bit of a turn lately which I think will lend it to be better and more inline with the LD community. It’s definitely a little more of an extreme take on the whole subject, but then again, that’s kind of what movies are. Ordinary people in extreme situations.

Thanks again everyone for the input! It’s been super helpful! When this film gets made I will most definitely be putting you guys under the special thanks section in the credits. And free coverage!? Yes please!! I really hope you guys like it!

Something I would like as I complete the screenplay is to find 4 or 5 of the members here that would be willing to read through the script and give me feedback on it. It would have to be a contractual thing though, unfortunately, but if that sounds like something you’d be interested in let me know!

Something else that would be more involved would be a consultation type situation. I would love to find a couple of people that would like to get into a google hangout or skype with me a couple of times and have some in depth conversations about the story and how it fits with lucid dreaming. This would be down the road a bit too, but if that sounds like something you’d like to be involved in then let me know!

Thanks again guys! I can’t wait for you to see the final product!

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The other thing is that I’ve always been able to read text, and see my hands normally. But the 14th lucid dream I had (last night), sort of confused me. About 40% of my dreams had text in them, and I could always easily read it. This dream, just looking at it hurt my eyes, it was blurry and always changing. My hands looked gross and the fingers were all blurred.

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