Youâre writing PTSD dreams wrong
But donât worry, most writers are and Iâm here to help because reading them is making me cRAzY.
Iâm writing this because Iâve read three otherwise great romance novels back to back featuring characters dealing with PTSD (or PTSD symptoms) and each one of them made the same dream mistakes. I honestly canât think of a fiction book Iâve read that didnât make these mistakes, so I thought Iâd compile a handy dandy list of mistakes and how to fix them.Â
Lucky for you, I have PTSD and a ton of fellow veteran friends who deal with these symptoms.Â
*This is based on my experience and things told to me by friends. This is not to say that the below doesnât happen in real life, only that itâs not as common as you might think.
The issue with these dreams is twofold: on one side is the psychological accuracy of the dream and on the other side is how youâre using the dream within the narrative.
Oh an Black Sails spoilers-ish ahead.Â
1) Stop writing the dream as a shot-by-shot accurate retelling of Traumatic Event.
Listen, not only do dreams seldom follow reality, but our own memories are tricky at best. I donât remember getting beaten up because a) it was horrifying and we block stuff like that out and b) I was going in and out of consciousness. It would be pretty strange for me to dream something I donât even fully remember. Our brains are simply not wired to do these vivid factually-accurate cinematic retellings.
My friend dreams things that did happen, but in his own words those dreams are always wrong in some noticeable or bizarre way. For instance, heâs getting chased through the streets of Iraq by a werewolf.Â
2) Dreams are informed by reality, not direct reflections of it.Â
Itâs entirely likely my friend dreamt of a werewolf in Iraq because I got him binge watching Supernatural and the two ideas merged in his dreamstate. But see, thatâs how dreams work.Â
The trauma event exists as a constant in his subconscious, but he has all this other information right there in his conscious mind all day, every day. In dreams, there isnât a clear delineation between that information.
My dreams are often dependent on whatever Iâve fallen asleep watching on television. The themes are consistent, but not the content.
In Black Sails, Captain Flintâs trauma dreams feature his dead partner and friend following him around his empty ship. You have an element of the trauma (the animated corpse of his friend) + his daily existence (his ship). The two things intersect to form these unsettling nightmares as expressions of his fears and grief. He never once relives the event itself in his dreams as shown on screen.
3) Trauma dreams often revolve around feelings, not necessarily the events themselves.
The PTSD package generally includes heaps of shame, guilt, anger and fear. As someone who survived a beating when I should have had control of the situation, my dreams tend to revolve around fear that people will know Iâm a fraud or being unable to act in a dangerous situation.Â
Again, itâs entirely common for trauma victims to not remember large chunks (or the whole thing) of the trauma event. So why should their dreams be stunningly accurate? What we remember are feelings. Real strong feelings.
You cannot go wrong if you write your trauma dream around feelings, not a specific event.
4) If you present trauma dreams as expressions of themes, you can let go of the trauma dream as an exposition dump/way overused suspense trope.
You know youâve read this: MC has dreams that are a shot-by-shot retelling of Traumatic Event that always cut off right before Traumatic Event, so that the Big Reveal must happen by a discovery later in the novel.Â
If I were the MC in a book, the easy and common thing would be to use the âdream sequenceâ as an expository retelling of Traumatic Event as a way to give some backstory to why I might be surly, mistrustful, afraid to try something new, whatever, and to clumsily shoehorn in suspense where there doesnât need to be.
The much more interesting thing might be if my dreams were inconsistent in content but consistent in theme. In one Iâm on an alien planet (because I fell asleep watching the Science Channel again) and the ground opens up and I fall into a pit from which I canât escape because I am helpless. In another a man is watching me while I sleep where I am again frozen and helpless. This would force the reader to think: what is the recurring issue in these dreams? Why is it important? What is this telling me about this character and what happened to her?Â
It could be a personal preference, but Iâd rather see the Traumatic Event either told in narrative flashbacks (not dreams) or verbally retold by the character in question. Let the dreams tell me something deeper about the character. Itâs not that I was beat up, itâs that I feel like a failure because of it. One of these things is a shallow factual detail, the other tells you something about me as a person that Iâm sharing with you, gentle reader, because talking about this stuff is healthy.
5) The Traumatic Event doesnât have to be a big secret.Â
In Black Sails, we know what happened to Captain Flintâs partner. It happened in real time in the show. That didnât make his uber disturbing dreams less disturbing or mysterious. Fans still debate exactly what the symbolism was and what they were telling us about James Flint in those moments. We do know from the dreams that he was disturbed, obsessed, and also monumentally guilty and blaming himself for what happened.Â
The mystery was perhaps more heightened by the fact that the dreams werenât direct reflections of reality. We know who this person was, what she believed, and why she died. That Flint is imagining her screaming silently in his ear is horrifying and discordant with what we know to be factual. This adds emotional complexity to his character and the decisions heâs making while suffering these dreams.Â
^^^this didnât happen. It was a dream. A real unsettling dream.
Once you let go of the concept of the trauma dream as a literal retelling and exposition dump, you have the entire dreamscape to work in other narrative elements, like symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing, etc.Â
*1st gif source: @idontwikeit
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