Spotlight: Dream State

An Author's Digression

I got the idea for "Dream State" in November, 2000.

I had just read another non-arousing story on the The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive. There seems to be a whole sub-genre of MC stories that have the following basic plot:

Hero gets hit by a car (almost ALWAYS a car, by the way!). Hero finds himself in a hospital (sometimes in a coma, but not always). Hero finds his nurse sexy and wants to see a little more of her. Nurse shows hero what she has underneath her uniform as well as an unprofessional bedside manner. Hero cannot believe what happened (hmmm... sounds like one of those old Penthouse Forum letters). Hero decides he can control minds. Hero now controls anything with tits and a cunt.

Since I am of the opinion that it's not always a good idea to criticize something unless I could do better, I decided to write my own version that at least tries to address the limitations of this particular subgenre. What came out as a result was "Dream State."

Obviously, as somebody who never was in a coma, and who has not personal experience with MC, I wasn't writing from experience. However, the people writing the other stories in that subgenre obviously had the same limitations.

So, I wrote the first two chapters of "Dream State." I set the story up in the army, another place where I have no experience, and in the 1970's (well, I know that era pretty well). I imagined what spending over a decade asleep would be like, especially if you managed to get some strange MC ability during that time.

I found myself getting interested in Mary. She had an overdeveloped sense of guilt, and she had some sort of mind connection with the patient. I decided to make the MC ability seem more like ESP and astral projection rather than mind control itself. Why? I felt that it would be easier for the characters to accept. Instead of "Wow! I can make any girl fuck me senseless!" it was "How did I know what she was dreaming?" It seemed more realistic to me.

Of course, what's an MC story without multiple partners? I actually debated over this, but decided in the end that the various personalities of the characters made for a better story.

Writing to my outline went fine until I got to chapter fourteen. The plot synopsis for that chapter was simple: Confrontation. The people would find out who are following them.

Looking over the nineteen different drafts over two years for chapter fourteen, I found that the story just wouldn't work the way I originally planned it. Instead, I felt that the characters had to learn more about the powers that were being described. There had to be a realistic answer to the "how" and "why" questions.

Fast forward to 2004. I had written about ten chapters of a sequel to "Lucky Tickets" when I picked up chapter fourteen of "Dream State" again. In the past couple of years, I had tried a lot of alternate tracks, and although they were interesting, they just didn't make the story work.

I did another digression, and rewrote the chapter, this time from another point of view other than Jim's.

Funny thing: It worked!

From chapter fourteen, the next chapters actually worked. I postponed the confrontation, and now had a way to describe the "how" and "why." There was a rehash of something that I had already wrote in chapter eleven, so I removed the earlier part from the final novel.

I didn't do that, but instead, I continued to move onward. Armed with knowledge, I found myself free to continue the story. In fact, I felt so free that I inserted characters from another of my stories into this one!

Of course, I still had to have a confrontation, but now I was able to call the shots in a better way than I had been at chapter fourteen. At the same time, I found some of the alternate scenes I wrote while blocked on chapter fourteen were actually quite nice, and I merged them into the story, making the story about four chapters longer.

I managed to write the confrontation scene, and it just plain worked.

The only thing left was the wrap up for the end of the story.

The ending was very difficult (although not impossible) to write. I find it difficult to say "good-bye" to characters in my stories, and it was even more so since this story evolved over four and a half years. The story ends in 2001, and I don't have any intention of publishing any narrative sequel, but have left myself a few notes on how I could write a separate story within the same "universe" if I ever find myself wanting to try.

So there you have it. Four years of hard work, and a story of twenty-six chapters. I found that my writing style has altered during that time... when I was fixing up some continuity errors in the earlier chapters, I found quite a lot of things that got past my editorial eye that would never have done so more recently.

The spirit of the yin/yang, the circle of life, time moving endlessly... these are common enough ideas that Dream State contains, although it by no means invented the concepts.