Dynamic Characters (18 page)

Sometimes new writers defend this practice on Freudian grounds: ''It's her subconscious that actually knows this information all along, only she can't admit it. She's in denial. Then it comes out in a dream, and so the character is forced to act on it.''

This defense at first seems to make a certain amount of sense. Undoubtedly there are times for all of us when our subconscious knows more than we do, and that knowledge may well turn up in dreams. Real life is like that. The problem is that real life is not fiction. Real life, as a rule, is much messier and less organized than fiction, which seeks to impose a pattern on the world. So on those rare occasions when real life actually produces an event
more
patterned and neater than fiction, we marvel. ''Truth really is stranger than fiction,'' we say, as the murderer turns out to be the long-lost cousin of the victim. We accept real-life coincidence because we have to. It
happened.
But in fiction we don't have to accept it, and if it seems too convenient, we won't. A dream that unfolds the next section of plot— or even worse, the climax of the plot—seems too easy, too much engineered by the author. Don't do it.

The very worst version of the dream-as-plot-device is such a cliche that I hardly need mention it (do I?). This is the dream forced into service as story resolution: ''Then I woke up and it was all a dream.'' Readers hate this. They feel cheated. They believed the story was a story—that is, that it was actually happening to someone, even if that someone is fictional. To discover that the story wasn't happening even to an unreal person is a great blow. Don't inflict it.

DREAM PITFALL NUMBER TWO: THE OVERLONG DREAM

Because dreams are unreal, they call subtle attention to the unreality of the entire work. Sort of a second-layer unreality: the unfactual illusions of someone who is already an unfactual illusion. You can minimize this effect by keeping your characters' dreams short.

I cannot emphasize this enough. The brief retold dream becomes a story detail, one of many, that contributes to characterization. The long retold dream becomes a scene in itself and is almost always too fragile (an ''airy nothing,'' in the Bard's words) to carry such importance.

So how short is short enough? That depends on what function the dream serves. Usually one lengthy paragraph is enough, but not always. We'll look at some examples in a minute, in the section on using dreams well.

DREAM PITFALL NUMBER THREE: THE FREUDIAN CLICHE

Finally, including a protagonist's dreams can actually
harm
characterization. Dreams become pitfalls when they are so overtly Freudian or Jungian that it appears the author has constructed them from a Handy-Dandy Psychology of the Unconscious Kit. Freudian psychology does indeed have an elaborate and significance-fraught lexicon of dream symbols. Some of these have entered the common culture: cigars as phallic symbols, flying as sexual metaphor. Similarly, many people talk easily about ''Jungian archetypes,'' to the point where it may seem reasonable that the audience for literary fiction should be able to translate the symbols you've put into your character's dreams. And perhaps many readers will be able to do that.

However, this is a mixed blessing. One part of your reader's mind may well register, ''Ah! A dream about being born! Well, that makes sense, this character is certainly struggling to begin a new life.'' But another part of the same reader's mind is going, ''So neat, so pat, so connect-the-dots.'' You can avoid this by keeping your character's dreams quirky, not Freudian-mechanical. Quirky, individual and short.

USING DREAMS WELL: DREAMS UNDER PRESSURE

The legitimate use of dreams in fiction is not to drive plot, but to illuminate character. There are a few different ways to do this.

The most straightforward is to simply recount the dream as the character has it. This works best when the character is under great internal pressure because of story events, and his dreaming is just one among many ways of dramatizing that pressure. If the pressure is building to a climax, the character's tension may be so great that more than one paragraph is justified for the dream. Here is Alice Hoffman's protagonist, Polly Farrell, from the novel
At Risk.
Polly's eleven-year-old daughter Amanda is dying of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion. This has affected every area of Polly's life. Just before Amanda stops going to school, Polly dreams:

Tonight she dreams that she has lost Amanda and cannot find her. She enters her dream through an alleyway made of stones. She can hear children crying, and the sound of shovels, methodically hitting against the earth. It's raining and the ground is slippery; as she runs, mud splashes up and coats her legs, turning them the color of blood.

This is what she knows: Someone has taken her daughter. Someone has put up a fence ringed with spikes. Someone is screaming in the distance. There are other children here, with no one to care for them, but Polly has no time for them. She runs faster. Her heart is pounding. She reaches the shelter she's looking for, and when she goes inside all she can see is one bed after another. Rows and rows of iron beds made up with white sheets. This is the children's house. This is the place where they're given food and water every day, but there is still no one to hold them. As she walks through the shelter, children cry out to her, babies lift their arms, begging to be picked up. They all look the same to her, that is what's horrible. They look like

Amanda, but they're not. Polly knows she will recognize her own daughter; she must. There she is, in a small bed pushed up against a wall. Amanda can no longer speak, but Polly can tell she recognizes her. She wraps her in a sheet, and after they leave the shelter, after they step outside, the sheet trails in the mud and makes a hissing sound.

The alley she first entered by is the only way out, and, without seeing them, Polly knows there are guards. But all guards grow careless, they grow sleepy when their stomachs are full, when the screaming is in the distance and not right at their feet. So Polly crouches down low; it is dusk now, but that won't last forever. They will wait until dark. When no one is looking, when their backs are turned, Polly will hoist Amanda over her shoulder and make her way back to the alley. The only thing they really have to fear is a full moon, because in this dream even moonlight is dangerous.

The chapter ends there. It would be hard to imagine a more effective dramatization of Polly's fear, helplessness and pain.

A shorter dream, merely mentioned in passing, can nonetheless hint at complex emotions underneath. The narrator of Lynne Reid Banks's
The Backward Shadow
has come through complicated story events involving her single motherhood of David, now a toddler, plus failed romances, a new business and the mental illness of her best friend, housemate and business partner. Near the end of the book, when the protagonist has emerged from her trials stronger than before, a briefly cited dream forms only part of her moment of self-realization:

Dottie and I would be real partners now; I had served my apprenticeship and could work with her on an even footing. The business now mattered to me as much as to her, and I knew almost as much about it. There seemed no reason at all why we shouldn't make a real success of it between us. And as for our common personal problem—to wit, men—in that elevated moment of anticipated happiness, there was no room for doubts. My old conviction returned to me full force—once one achieves self-reliance, once one has overcome the need for men, that's when they come, usually in droves. I laughed into my pillow, fell asleep, and dreamed of David, grown tall and handsome, making love to me . . . horrors! But I woke the next morning laughing because it was so obvious and Freudian, and I felt so happy suddenly, I felt that I, too, had been cured.

Is your protagonist at an emotional turning point in the story? Is she under enough pressure to be dreaming about the situation? Can you concoct for her a dream that is both clear enough in meaning so that it dramatizes her emotional state, but not so clear it seems mechanical? If so, recount her dream as she has it.

USING DREAMS WELL: CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Another way to use dreams is to have the character experience the dream not at the time of the story, but years earlier. He then recalls the dream when story events remind him of it. This makes the dream seem less author-engineered than when his current dreams conveniently convey current information. Herman Wouk uses this technique to enhance a descriptive passage in
The Caine Mutiny.
Willie Keith is at his preliminary hearing for court-martial for mutiny:

There were a few dreams of childhood which Willie could never forget, one in particular, in which he had seen God as an enormous jack-in-the-box popping up over the trees on the lawn of his home and leaning over to stare down at him. The scene in the anteroom of the Com Twelve legal office had the same quality of unreal and painful vividness. There were the green close walls; the bookcase full of fat regular legal volumes bound in brown and red; the single fluorescent light overhead, throwing a bluish glare; the ashtray full of butts beside him on the desk, sending up a stale smell; the ''board of investigation,'' a surly, thin little captain, his voice dry and sneering, his face the face of a nasty post-office clerk refusing a badly wrapped package.

Does your story contain description—or thoughts, or exposition— that might be similarly made graphic by a remembered dream?

Similar to remembered dreams are recurrent dreams, those dreams we have over and over again throughout our lives. Suppose, for instance, your character, who is now forty-seven years old and a successful surgeon, has had the same dream ever since he was thirteen: He's on the third floor of his high school, the school bus is pulling away without him, and he can't get his locker open. Throughout the course of your novel, you might briefly show this dream recurring whenever this grown man feels particularly incapable and at the mercy of external events. Used this way, it can add to his characterization, showing us a vulnerable side to a usually decisive person.

USING DREAMS WELL: LISTEN TO
THIS
NIGHTMARE!

Sometimes remembered dreams can be used effectively in dialogue. One character can recite last night's dreams to a second character— and by including that second character's reactions, you characterize both of them.

There are two possibilities. One, the character reciting the dream is the POV character. Here, for example, POV character Pamela is relating a dream to her husband, Ben:

''I dreamed again last night about Judy,'' Pamela said at breakfast. She spoke carefully, keeping her voice steady. Lately Ben had seemed to flinch at hearing Judy's name.

''Oh?'' he said. He picked up the
Post.

''She was standing in the cemetery again, beside her grave. We were all there, even the babies, and I was crying. Then Judy came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Pam, honey—don't cry. I'm here.' I said, 'But you're dead!' and Judy said, 'Yes, well, you can't have everything.'''

''Ummm,'' Ben said. He turned to the Metro section.

''The odd thing was that after she said that, I felt better,'' Pamela said. But that didn't really do the dream justice. How to convey to Ben the warm, wonderful tide of comfort the dream had given her? Comfort that felt—never mind if this was irrational—directly from Judy herself. You can't have everything—that was Judy, her own personal mix of cheerful irreverence and practical acceptance, and just hearing it had made Pamela so happy she'd wanted to go on crying, but now not from grief. How to let Ben know the difference this dream—unlike the others—had made for Pamela?

She said, ''Ben, when I woke up, I felt so . .. so . . .'' ''I think, Pam,'' Ben said, rustling the newspaper, ''that it's morbid to start each day with talking about Judy. We could have some other topic of conversation at breakfast, don't you think?''

The content of Pamela's dream, her thoughts about it, Ben's reactions—all characterize these two people. And if the plot includes the dissolution of this marriage, Pamela and Ben's sharing (or nonshar-ing) of this dream also furthers that dissolution.

The other use of dreams in dialogue occurs when the character reciting the dream is not the POV character. Here you lose the chance to contrast the spoken version of the dream with the dreamer's thoughts about it. But you gain the chance to give more intimate reactions of the listener, who is the POV character. In W. Somerset Maugham's
Of Human Bondage,
for example, Mildred daily recites all her dreams to Philip, who is bored to tears by them. We see quite concretely both that Mildred is a drag and that Philip has fallen out of love. Her dreams form part of his nightmare.

A SPECIAL CASE: USING DAYDREAMS

Not all dreams, of course, happen when we're asleep. Because daydreams are under conscious control, they dramatize different aspects of a character: conscious wishes, plans and fantasies. Many writers use daydreams in this way.

One who takes the technique farther is Marilyn French in
Her Mother's Daughter.
French shows us in great detail the daydream that Belle has about her photographer daughter Anastasia, who has been sent on a photography assignment to the Middle East. In Belle's imaginings, Anastasia is feted by kings, lionized for her talent, superbly dressed in satin gowns, ''disdainful and unattainable.'' Juxtaposed to Belle's daydream is Anastasia's reality: