stories | Follow The Pull

Recently my mother uncovered a stack of stories written by a six year old me. I’ve decided to start an ongoing feature where I share these stories – complete with typos and misspellings – just so you can see not only that I’ve been telling stories for as long as I could talk, but that the stories that come out of this little head have always been a bit…off.

Today’s story is stretching a bit because I realize I was probably 8 when I wrote it even though it was stored with my 1986-87 papers, but I thought it was too good to pass up. It was an exercise I was given in school requiring me to use certain big words. Those words were underlined on my paper. The results are interesting.

The Ghost

Last night I had a dream about making a commercial that promoted a new Ghostbuster movie! In my dream I requested that my little brother be submitted as the baddest ghost in town. When I woke up next to my bed all dressed up like a little ghost was my brother looking mean and saying, “According to copyright protection any photograph or produced endorsement from a book or movie must have prior approval.” I said, “What?”

the end

– “Humans and Chickens are slaves to robot army”

– “2 astronauts get caught in a giant space net and taken to a giant-sized version of Earth”

– “Island nation is invaded by Nazis. Kid fights back by leading sea monster and fairy army”

All of these are entries in my dream journal. All of them are also being written into short stories. Why? Because I bloody well have to. Sometimes I wake up fresh from a dream so intense, so weird and so exhilarating that I have to follow that story thread through. See my dreams never have an ending. The only way for me to see what happens is to let my imagination take me there.

Here’s an example of one I finished:

– “Small town kids all turn into super heroes. Quiet kid gets it first and learns his school crush is a super villain”

And here’s a link to the actual story:

http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2879058/1/Heat-Vision

Not all of us dream the same. I have a friend that claims he only dreams about mundane scenarios from his ordinary life. Not too exciting to write about sitting in the office drinking a cup of coffee. And yet…the writer in me wants to try to pull a story out of just that scenario. What if the coffee is…EVIL COFFEE!!! What if it’s actually a living liquid creature that is letting itself be drank so it can infiltrate the body of my friend and make him do horrible things that will culminate in the destruction of Earth as we know it! Okay, I’ll stop there.

The point to my fellow writers, storytellers, artists of all mediums and weavers of tales of all shapes and sounds is to mine your dreams. Mine them like there’s gold there and each and every fleck and pebble you find is a valuable commodity waiting to be turned into a beautiful necklace worn by a fairy tale princess.

Just re-read the above. Yikes. My melodrama is showing. I want to go on a tangent now about how we need to create for ourselves and what our subconscious desires ask of us, but I’ll save that for another time. I smell another blog tomorrow! Smells like fried pickles.

Later, dreamers