Also in a separate New Post today try the following writing activity using the interesting sentences regarding dreams that you and your classmates taped up to the wall on Monday (see the list below in Courier New for your choices). We'll call these sentences "dream threads," little bits that you've pulled from a bigger piece and that could be "woven" back together in interesting ways.
- Choose one of the sentences to begin your story. You may use it word for word or alter it slightly if necessary.
- Choose another sentence to end your story.
- Fill in the space in between with a story connecting the two sentences. This will likely be fiction but it doesn't have to be. It also doesn't need to be especially long and may only be a portion of a bigger, more complicated story--maybe 200 words or so--but it could be.
I was stuck, paralyzed and petrified as he stalked through the shadows, his knife gleaming in the moonlight.
Then I was chased by Frankenstein...opening up the last door I see my mom, dead, hanging upside down.
It's soul was in my body. I was feeling what it was feeling. And it was so scared.
This is a dream I had about Leslie dying.
I see fire.
One time I had a weird dream about midgets tricycling across America (this isn't even a joke; it was so weird).
I was back in the house in St. Louis; everything had a gritty, sandy look to it.
I can see myself laying in my bed and I try to wake myself up but it never seems to work.
As I'm sitting on the traintracks, I look to my left and I see a train off in the distance, then I look away for a while but as soon as I turn to look at it again, the train is half and inch from me. I wake up right before it hits me.
The tattoo artist enthusiastically came up to me with a drawing of a large peacok made entirely of interlocking monkeys.
As the copperhead strikes, a huge owl with a crescent moon on its brow swoops from the misty woods, taking the snake from my wrist into her talons and disappears into the forest.
I could hear growling and pouding against the floor as the creature neared even closer.
A common dream I have is when I have gum stuck in my teeth and no matter how hard I try, I can't get it out.
I dream about boy butts.
I think about why things happened or just end up overanalyzing the day.
A miniature whale jumped out of a fish tank.
Before I fall asleep, I think of 3D shapes and 3D colors.
Add an image that goes along with it. Let me show you how to add images if you haven't figured it out yet. Put the sentences you borrowed in bold and use Dream Threads as your title.
Here are a couple I came up with in the past (from different sets of sentences)...I probably would have never gone this direction in my writing without others' dream threads to borrow from...
The paper said that I specifically had to stick the six-inch needle through my kneecap. I was skeptical that the relatively tiny cylinder of metal could penetrate the dense bone and reach the byways of blood beneath, but if I wanted the results, the escape, I had to follow the instructions left for me by The One Who Knows. After a deep breath, I tilted my head to the sky, squeezed my eyes closed and blindly jabbed the syringe into the flesh and rock of my knee. Seconds, minutes, hours, days later...who knows...I woke up gasping for air.
I am stuck in a forest and can't get out. Every day with him I feel more and more trapped, closed in, chopped down, gnarled. If I had known going in that he would take an axe to my heart I would have found a new path. Cut him out. Walked away. But he's here saying he's grown, adapted. I still see only the axe. It should come as no surprise that when he says, "I love you," I react very negatively.
