Phantom scene (notes from the cave troll)

[pbray]

There's a phenomenon called vivid dreaming where you wake up convinced that the events of the dream are real. I've had this happen a few times in my life, including the memorable occasion where I spent several hours being angry with my sister only to gradually realize that I was blaming her for something that had happened in a dream.

I had a vivid writing experience this morning. Before I started writing I looked over my story notes, which by now is a combination of the original outline, current sketches of the scenes left to write, plus several pages of notes and scraps of paper with ideas on what comes next, lines of dialogue, etc. Then I looked at where I had left off.

"Hmm," I thought to myself. "Something is missing."

There was a scene I was sure I had written. But it doesn't actually exist in the printed hardcopy that I had marked up. Took an entire cup of coffee, staring at my notes and going through the printouts to realize that even though I knew this scene in detail, I hadn't actually written it yet.

Hmm. Well, it's now back to the salt mines, and time to key in the scene that some alternate me in a parallel dimension has surely already crafted.

Comments

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

Ha! I've done both of these as well. I once spent a whole day searching for a chapter I was convinced I'd written and that had somehow gotten magically deleted. When I finally went through the computer logs, I convinced myself that I had not actually written it yet, it was just so real in my mind I'd convinced myself of this.

I didn't realize it was common.

And the dreaming . . . let's just say I dream heavily, dream alot, and often dream of people I don't know going through life without it ever seeming to intersect my life. I think this is where my characters actually come from.