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10 Fantastical Stories Based on a Dream


Dreams are mysterious things. People talk about prophetic dreams and dreams that tell of your souls true wants or desires. Some people say it’s just all the mixed up thoughts in your head churning around. But there’s no doubt that dreams can be great inspiration. Some of our most beloved (and not-so-beloved) stories were based on dreams. Sometimes they were very bizarre dreams. Sometimes they were nightmares. So let’s take a look at some sci-fi and fantasy stories based off dreams and hope we can remember our dreams and get similar “eureka” moments. Do you know of any other dream-based stories not on the list? Say so in the comments!

  1. 'The Sandman' Gave Neil Gaiman a Dream

    All too appropriately, many of the stories in the famous Sandman comic were based off dreams. Neil Gaiman sorts through a lot of his stories in his dreams. He says of them:

    "I think I love my dreaming process because one of the things that my dreaming process does is sort out stories for me. I will go to sleep stuck on what happens next, I will wake up and somewhere these boys in the back room have been moving heavy furniture around, they've been digging, they've been painting, they've been plastering and they present me with the solution. If that means I'm going to be a little bit chatty or a little bit weird in my sleep, I will go for it.”

  2. 2000 AD's 'Dream of Deadworld'

    An arc in the comic 2000 A.D. called “Dreams of Dead World” was based off of a nightmare. The story’s version of the “Dark Judges”, the longtime foes of Judge Dredd, were based off of a nightmare the artist Dave Kendall had. He owes remembering the dream to his children. He said, “An unheard of thank you, for the early morning wake up by my children, which allowed these versions of the Dark Judges to be dragged kicking and screaming into the light.”

  3. James Cameron's 'The Terminator' Nightmares

    The idea for The Terminator came to James Cameron in a fever dream. The iconic scene where the metal Terminator exoskeleton is flattened in the first movie comes from an image in Cameron’s nightmare. He dreamed of a metal, skeletal torso, dragging itself across the floor towards him with hands like kitchen knives.

  4. H.R. Giger's 'Alien' Nightmares

    The creatures designed by H.R. Giger for the 1979 Alien movie are certainly nightmarish, but you might not know they were inspired by actual nightmares. Sketching out his nightmares when he worked and creating those creatures actually helped him work through the bad dreams and cured him of his night terrors. “I feel very, very safe and happy and I have no more nightmares but at the time, in earlier days, I could heal myself through doing my work,” he asserted.

  5. The 'Avatar' Dream of James Cameron's Mom

    James Cameron’s Avatar was also inspired by a dream- not his dream, but his mother’s. The memorable look of the tall, blue Naa’vi people in the movie came from a dream his mother had. 

    When talking about the origins of the film, he said:

    “My mother said, 'I had this dream about a 12-foot-tall blue woman.' And I thought, that's kind of a cool image. So in '76 or '77, I was writing my first screenplay, a big science fiction story, took place on multiple planets. At the end of the film was this planet with a native population that was 12 feet tall and blue. And gorgeous. So when I started to write Avatar, I had done some paintings of what they would look like. Purple fields of waving grass and these blue people with big golden eyes, and I thought, 'Why don't I go back to that, that was pretty cool?'"

  6. Stephenie Meyer's Sparkly 'Twilight' Dream

    There are plenty who love Stephenie Meyer’s sparkly vampire series and many who curse its existance. Either way, you can credit the sparklepires and the series in general on a dream Meyer had. She said the dream came about because she was “really burnt out” after a lot of hard work as a mother and felt like a “zombie mom”.

    Describing her dream, she said “"It was two people in kind of a little circular meadow with really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy and one was just a girl who was human and normal, and they were having this conversation. The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I'd be dreaming about vampires, and he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how much he wanted to kill her,"

    The dream turned into that exact scene in chapter 13 of Twilight. According to Meyer, it really “captured her imagination”. She actually started writing the book in an effort to remember the dream. “The dream was just something I was so interested in, and it was so different from what my everyday was at the time. I just wanted to remember it so badly. That's why I started writing it down -- not because I thought this would be a great story for a novel."

    She thought it was “presumptious” to think anyone would want to read a book by her, but she kept writing about the dream and escaping into her fantasy world and eventually realized she has written enough to make a book.

  7. David Robert Mitchell Followed a Dream for 'It Follows'

    It Follows is a…strange movie. It’s basically about a sexually transmitted ghost curse. The idea is a person has a ghost-like entity stalking them. If it catches them, it will kill them. But if the cursed person has sex with someone, the curse will pass to whoever they had sex with and the ghost will stalk their unlucky sexual partner instead. Yeah. Horror movies have always had a weird attitude towards sex, I guess.

    Anyway, it came from a reoccurring nightmare the director, David Robert Mitchell, had. Not the sex part, but the being stalked part. He had dreams throughout his childhood of being followed by a strange entity. “ "I didn't use those images for the film, but the basic idea and the feeling I used. From what I understand, it's an anxiety dream. Whatever I was going through at that time, my parents divorced when I was around that age, so I imagine it was something to do with that."

    And then from that, he somehow got to “sexually transmitted ghost”. 

  8. H.P. Lovecraft's Creepy Cthulu Dreams

    Horror icon H.P. Lovecraft had an extremely vivid dream life, which is where a lot of the vivid creatures in his stories came from. Lovecraft said once, “I wonder…if I have a right to claim authorship of things I dream? I hate to take the credit, when I did not really think out the picture with my own conscious wits. Yet, if I do not take credit, who’n Heaven will I give credit to?”

    He found he dreamed more frequently than people around him, saying  while others say they only dream once of twice a year, “I can never drop off for a second—not even in my easy chair or over my desk without having dreams of the most vivid sort; not always bizarre or fantastic, but always clear-cut & life-like”.

     While the dreams did inspire some story elements and visuals, he didn’t think they were good inspiration for the actual plot of a story. Dreams weren’t coherent and he wanted his stories to be coherent.

    However, he did often try to capture the atmosphere of his nightmares in writing.  For the dream that inspired. Nyarlathotep, he saidAs I was drawn into the [dream] abyss I emitted a resounding shriek…& the picture ceased. I was in great pain  [..] but I had only one automatic impulse – to write, & preserve the atmosphere of unparalled fright; & before I knew it I had pulled on the light & was scribbling desperately. “

  9. Mary Shelley's Horrific 'Frankenstein' Dream

    As is well-known, Mary Shelley first wrote Frankenstein at the villa of Lord Byron, where after a gathering where many ghost stories were told,  he challenged guests to write their own horror stories. The night of the challenge, Shelley had what she describes as a “waking dream”:

    “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.”.

    The vision scared her quite a bit and she realized what terrified her would terrify others, so she preceded to write a story that described “the spectre that haunted me at my midnight pillow”.

  10. Robert Louis Steven's Dream and Nightmare for 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'

    The story for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a nightmare so vivid it woke up even his wife.

    She recounts that she was woken up by Stevenson crying out in his sleep. She woke him from his nightmare, which he was miffed about because he wanted to continue with the horror and get more inspiration. “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” Yo, Stevenson, if she hadn’t woken you, odds are you wouldn’t have remembered that dream. Maybe you owe her a thank you.

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