[Haruhi] In Your Dreams

[Halbarad]

Another fic already, I'm as shocked as anyone else. The basic premise here is that through a series of conversations between the Brigade members and Sakanaka, Haruhi gets the idea to look into the premise of lucid dreaming. First chapter is done (and attached), second chapter will be along in a bit but I probably won't publish on ff.net until it's done.

C&C as always is welcomed.

[Anastasia]

I think  your download is busted. I'm getting an index.php when I try and download with a size of -1 bytes.

[Halbarad]

Not sure what the issue with the attachment is; I'll have to reupload it once I get home.

[Arakawa]

Odd. I got the attachment successfully. (I notice you've taken it down for the moment.)

Is the version I have still valid for C&C purposes, or are you going to change things in the reupload?

[Halbarad]

No, nothing should be changed - it's the same file. Brian's gotten it reattached for me at this point in any case. (Thanks!)

[Brian]

Abusing moderator powers for questionable good, go. >.>

Should have asked if it was okay to edit the post....  I tested the attachment and it's working fine for me, but Hal noted that it could be a browser issue with the forum.

Dune: You can probably get Hal to DCC it to you (or I can).  But using another browser might also fix it.


Edit: Should probably follow up on this; really liked the chapter, Hal, found it very inspirational. :)

[sarsaparilla]

I got the file and it seems valid; please find below my thoughts based on that version. The standard disclaimers apply (I'm not qualified to comment on the use of language, my interpretations of characters may not coincide with actual ones other than by accident).

The premise is interesting and has great potential. Being somebody to whom lucid dreaming comes naturally (and having conducted a lot of experiments while in that state to discover its possibilities), I am personally interested in seeing how this develops.

The beginning was a bit vague; it took me a while to put the events on the proper timeline and context; this may be addressed by the disclaimer/foreword in the final version. Specifically, I wasn't sure whether this was somehow related to 'Review' or not until the interactions made it clear.

A canon issue: The SOS Brigade is supposed to attend a formal flower viewing event on Tsuruya premises during the Golden Week (most likely on May 4, the Greenery Day), and give a theatrical presentation; this seems to conflict with the events of the fic.

A second canon issue: the SOS anniversary will be soon after the Golden Week, and Kyon is supposed to be working on getting Haruhi a proper gift, I don't know whether the hinted B plot (first Kyon then Asahina being late) is related.

When the characters first talked about a dream trip, I had some difficulties trying to figure out whether it was supposed to be a literal or figurative use of the word; most likely a problem on my side.

Kyon telling Haruhi about the closed space incident was very unexpected. Kyon knows that it wasn't a dream, and mentioning it to Haruhi can only be seen as a conscious effort to break the masquerade; however, we aren't given any reason for why Kyon would want to do that.

Overall, Haruhi comes through as surprisingly aggressive for the given situation. I tried to find a reason for that but couldn't.

That's all I could find on one reading; other than (IMHO) starting a bit abruptly, it flows well.

[Halbarad]

Should probably include that it's set after book 8, in that case. 9-11 don't really sit well with me, so likely very little of what I do is going to include that in the continuity. I do need to fix the time when this is occurring a little more solidly, though.

[thepanda]

Even I made some mistakes ther

there

Mikuru is looking at the book with a wide eyes now

Drop the a.

[Arakawa]

Okay, I went way overboard with my prose-stylistic suggestions. As always, glean what helps, ignore what doesn't, and don't stub a toe on the carborundum! I went through it inline (see attachment).

My only beef with the actual story is this:

Spoiler: ShowHide

Haruhi goes to sleep and wakes up no less than (goes to count) three times during the chapter, and it all happens off-screen during scene transitions. Given that this is first-person narration, and she's evidently preoccupied with the notion of dreaming (eagerness to read the book / suddenly redirecting the topic from a "dream trip" to literal dreaming / eventual interest in shared dreams specifically), it's effectively like she doesn't bother to notice whether or not she had dreams each time. This would be perfectly fine in any other fic, but the more she reads about the topic of lucid dreaming and the more enthusiasm she develops, the more ridiculous it gets that there's practically no mention of how she slept!

(sample mention of how she slept - very rough, just to give you an idea of the sort of information I'd kept expecting and never getting:

I wake up the next day, and I don't even think to remember whether I had any dreams last night until I'm already brushing my teeth in front of the mirror. Nope, I was out like a log after all that late-night studying.

That kind of sucks; one website had these wild-eyed claims that even reading about the possibility of lucid dreaming can trigger some people to have a lucid dream the following night, and frankly it's making me a bit suspicious. It sounds too good to be true, and I don't like that. Well, I guess I'll wait to read that book before I form a definite opinion on the matter.

Arriving at school {... etc ...}

As a subtle point, the approach I'd prefer is to only explicitly mention Haruhi waking up, and avoid explicitly mentioning when she goes to bed.

It's specifically a problem with the first person narration. Given the fact that Haruhi's focused on exploring her dreams, it ends up feeling strangely like actual dreaming is absent from her psyche and she just pretends that she has dreams.

Slightly less vehement beef is that you share almost precisely nothing about what Haruhi's found out on the topic of lucid dreaming. This seems to mask the prior problem somewhat, but only for people who aren't already familiar with the notion! (And people who clicked on the fic because they are curious but unfamiliar about lucid dreaming may be disappointed that there hasn't been any attempt to explain lucid dreaming so far.)

There are a number of ways to handle this problem, depending on your intentions for the fic, so I'm not sure what to suggest at this stage.

Anyhow, the lack of clear information on Haruhi's sleep/wakeup made me half-expect that you were setting up for some kind of mindscrew (enabled by the use of present tense) where one of the scenes happens in a dream and Haruhi almost-but-not-quite notices the fact, then wakes up the next morning having forgotten all about it... that would, to me, probably be the only justification for leaving out this portion of events. And even that could still work if we only mention how Haruhi wakes up.

As always, I'm probably overstating my vehemence. The chapter already works great as a character piece, if I make the effort to suppress what I know about lucid dreaming and treat it as mostly an Informed MacGuffin to drive character interaction rather than as the presumable major setpiece of the fic. That might well be your intent throughout the rest of the fic, although in that case I'd have to say it is going to leave me a bit disappointed.

Anyhow, thanks for brightening my day with this! The premise is making my head explode with possibilities as to what might happen next.

[Arakawa]

When the characters first talked about a dream trip, I had some difficulties trying to figure out whether it was supposed to be a literal or figurative use of the word; most likely a problem on my side.

I caught that. Kyon uses the notion of a "dream trip" figuratively, but Haruhi (since she keeps thinking about dreaming) seizes on the opportunity to change the subject to literal "dream trips".

So Kyon uses it figuratively and Haruhi twists the meaning into a literal one, so to speak. I think it's one of the particularly clever moments in the chapter, and it works well to establish how interested Haruhi really is in the subject :-)

[sarsaparilla]

Spoiler: ShowHide

Haruhi goes to sleep and wakes up no less than (goes to count) three times during the chapter, and it all happens off-screen during scene transitions. Given that this is first-person narration, and she's evidently preoccupied with the notion of dreaming (eagerness to read the book / suddenly redirecting the topic from a "dream trip" to literal dreaming / eventual interest in shared dreams specifically), it's effectively like she doesn't bother to notice whether or not she had dreams each time. This would be perfectly fine in any other fic, but the more she reads about the topic of lucid dreaming and the more enthusiasm she develops, the more ridiculous it gets that there's practically no mention of how she slept!

That is a good observation; When I first saw the basic concept of lucid dreaming mentioned somewhere I found it interesting, and without being aware of any guide books or exercises spent the next night exploring my inner space in that state (and the next, and the next ... until about a week later I had to relax a bit, as apparently lucid dreaming doesn't really count as sleep, and eventually sleep deprivation symptoms appear). One would expect Haruhi to need even less of a trigger to accomplish the same, as I'm not half as excitable as she is.

[Halbarad]

In terms of that, I can best relate Haruhi to my own experience. As someone who rarely (if ever) remembers more than a passing fragment of a dream, the idea of 'exploring' your dreams is definitely appealing, but the problem is that I wouldn't even know where to begin. I haven't deeply researched lucid dreaming, but from my understanding the first step to the process is making you more aware of your dreams, including dream logging, to make you more aware of having dreamed at all. From there, you work on techniques to increase your awareness inside the dream. If you don't even remember that you have dreamed most of the time, you don't really have any footing to start from - which is basically where Haruhi is starting as well.

She's not really showing more than a passing interest in the idea until after her talk with Kyon about the Melancholy dream, either, so she doesn't really have a reason to push things before that point. She finds the idea intriguing, but not really worth the full force of her attention until then. She'll definitely be paying a lot more attention to it from this point forward, but the chapter ends before she sleeps again. I'll add a little something in, but early in the chapter it's just not something she's devoting a lot of attention to (yet).

In regards to sharing details about lucid dreaming, I'm not an expert and I don't really intend for the story to turn into an instruction manual on how it works or how to do it. It's interesting, sure, but this isn't meant to be a scientific exploration of lucid dreaming techniques - the name should be enough to get readers that are interested a direction to start looking if they want to find out more themselves. I'm also not capable of doing it myself (it'd be fun, but too much effort to be worth it for me), and I'd rather leave the details vague than get something blatantly wrong. I'm sure there'll be plenty of 'that's not even possible in a dream!' from informed readers later on (hi, sarsaparilla!) but I'll plead artistic license at that point. =P It's mainly a device to tell a broader story, and one that's barely even started.

[Arakawa]

Okay. Artistic license is perfectly fine, especially given that Haruhi is involved. ('Adding a little bit' is precisely how I'd describe the changes I'm hoping for you to make in this chapter specifically.) The only thing I would caution is that, given how actually central lucid dreaming is to your story, you should know approximately as much about it as your characters. Otherwise there's a serious risk that the fic will feel seriously unnatural (see: Hollywood hacking) to those familiar with the topic and frustratingly uninformative to those who were unfamiliar and hoping to find out about the topic over the course of the fic.

EDIT: This may be excessively harsh, but I think what you're saying is that you're trying to avoid inaccuracies by being vague about the details. But the way I see it is that your fic ends up feeling inaccurate because it's so vague; it risks completely omitting mention of important things that Haruhi would be paying attention to, even at this stage.

Regarding the risk of turning the fic into an encyclopedia entry on lucid dreaming, I'm well aware of it. That's the challenge of a fic like this: make the set piece both accurate and relevant to the story. That you're only willing to go for one out of two (relevance) is sort of disappointing.

There's not that much you need to know, even... You could probably write a fic that didn't raise any complaints with me, and gave a fairly accurate picture of things, just by incorporating the following knowledge: what a reality check is, what a false awakening is, and the basic techniques of staying lucid once you gain lucidity (and what sorts of things happen when you fail to stay lucid). As to what might happen once you are successfully lucid, I'm afraid sarsaparilla has much more extensive experience than I do ;_;

You don't have to summarize the information in this chapter, just make sure to explain what Haruhi's doing when she actually starts doing it... and again, mention the moments when she wakes up...

(If I were to add one more thing to that list, I'd suggest that Haruhi would be very impatient to get started, and thus likely to go straight to one of the more challenging methods of lucid dream induction like WILD (Wake induced lucid dreaming). I can't really see her foregoing the chance to go straight into a lucid dream in favour of methodically spending a week tediously journaling and doing reality checks until she's tried the "instant but not guaranteed to work" approach.)

I'd write a longer and politer explanation, but I'm on the go and typing from a smartphone :-(

[Brian]

Hmm, to reprise my traditional role and add a dissenting opinion:

I think that the plot device exists to serve the story, not the other way around.

Furthermore, I'm of the opinion (this is, admittedly, just me) that accuracy is irrelevant compared to internal consistency.

Admittedly, I always do (sometimes way too much) research on everything I write, but as Hal says, this is storytelling, not an instruction manual.  The most important point is that it hold together.  Anyway, it's up to Hal, but Haruhi's probably not the best vehicle to explore those minutia anyway -- maybe it can be addressed in a future chapter, since it seems Kyon's supposed to be getting into it, too?