Writers: How many of you have got story ideas from your dreams?

A lonely pineapple? Was it.... by any chance, me?

Oh yeah, I got tons of my ideas from my dreams. [I'm not going to say them, some are freakily personal.] But yeah.

I've gotten story ideas from exceptionally vivid, bizarre dreams, but they always turn into hurriedly-scribbled notes or, at best, meandering short stories.

I do have dreams containing my characters, though, which - I think, or hope - is a good thing in terms of development and knowing my characters and all that grand stuff. Surprisingly enough, I've twice had a dream involving a writer friend of mine's character, named Gray. Some people were planning on killing him and I knew he was going to die, but I went all-out trying to save him. It was rather epic, actually. Dashing into fights, jumping off staircases, dumping buckets of paint on people, the whole shebang. Don't know where it came from, or why it was that particular character out of all the characters it could've been. But it was extremely tense - I had this clutching, urgent anxiety throughout the whole thing.

Anyhow.

Lonely pineapple? I think you watch too much Psych, lol

Most of my dreams seem too short and choppy, too confusing.

I had a dream recently where I was taking a scuba diving class and the final test was that I had to dive in a pool with a hammerhead, a whale shark, a great white, and a bunch of others. Except, the pool was a regular sized home pool, lol

Dreams break every law of physics and chemistry apparently

I have gotten scenes for my stories from my dreams, and once an actual story from them too. I always have to polish it up so it will be usable though.

For example, I once dreamed that I was locked out on a dock that was suspended up above the port, and I had to jump off to save my friend's life. Now, that by itself sounds more like a nightmare, but just when I had thought that my story wouldn't go anywhere, I had that dream. And it fit perfectly into my story.

Hmm well I don't get the full idea from a dream but if I have a good dream that actually makes sense and inspires something in my imagination then yes I use it to go with my story. But usually my dreams are really screwed up or I don't remember them.

I have gotten ideas from dreams, but the final product is often nothing like the dream itself. That's because of the whole "dream logic" being so messed up. Something in a dream can feel so important ("I had to win the race without sweating because if I started to sweat, something awful would happen") that doesn't translate to real life, logically.

But, I have extremely vivid dreams, and I have what I call "Epic Dreams" that actually have cohesive stories to them. I'm a princess fleeing a castle and my guards are being killed off one by one because of orc zombies in the surrounding woods, and I'm eventually saved by a dragon who requires me to repay my debt to him for saving me. Or I'm kidnapped at an elite, high-class amusement park as the entire island that the park is on is taken over by terrorists and we're used as ransom. This one I wrote a pretty good story from (in my then-16-year-old opinion).

I once dreamt something that seemed like a cool scene and then from it I developed the characters and a very dark, different story idea that has nothing to do with the dream. In the end, I didn't even use the scene from the dream! xD

Hell yeah. I always play around with scenes from my novel in my head whilst I'm trying to get to sleep so I end up dreaming about the book. Once, I dreamed I fell into the word document whilst writing only to realize that I had become the murderer and had to shoot my protagonist detective and his fiancee. The fiancee I could manage, but the detective is too witty to lose in my opinion!

I once and a while have a crazy enough dream to inspire me to think of either a good character, plot, or most of the time it's a setting for my writing.

I did just last night. It's abor a girl who goes to London as a exchange student but before she went she got mixed up with a gang who torture their victims in weird ways. Well when she got to London she found out she was staying with a big family. She has a crush on the oldest boy and when the gang finds her they take out her voicebox with a pocketknife and Spencer (The boy) has to kill them. (I had powerade before bed. I'm not crazy!)