Intro| Nightmares Upon Nightmares

Have you ever had a nightmare that as so vivid that you wake up drenched in sweat, shaking, believing it actually happened? Do you quickly grab for your phone or find a source of light? Your heart’s pounding and your eyes dart around the room to make sure no one is there. Your breathing eases and you slide back into bed as you realize it was just a nightmare. You fall back to sleep knowing that everything is okay, but do your nightmares ever continue? Do you ever fall back to sleep hoping to dream sweetly after that horrid experience, but instead your nightmare just picks up where it left off? This time you can’t wake up. Your body and your mind force you to face your fears and finish out the horrors. You know what’s going on, yet you can’t do anything about it. You’re lucid dreaming. This, to me, is what’s most petrifying, when you’re finally able to wake up, but your mind continues to get confused on whether the dream was real or not. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Nightmares aren’t just a childhood phase. They can become terrifyingly vivid. They can easily relate to your life events and cause you to over think yourself. Sometimes nightmares can become too much for one individual, causing them to seek mental help. Don’t worry, this doesn’t happen to everyone. Only the ones that are messed up, including me. I have chronic nightmares, so real that I question my life. My own existence. One way I thought would help ease the pain would be to write about them. So here I will entertain you with my nightmares. Enjoy.

Reviews

[UN]

Wow this is a really interesting concept for a work, I myself am fascinated with dreams. I don't always have lucid ones, but just the idea that we can travel to different places and have different experiences in our sleep is fascinating isn't it? This is a really good setup for your book, and I am really interested to see what types of nightmares you will be writing about. It also reminds me of my favorite nightmare sequence from a movie, are you familiar with Heffalumps and Woozles by any chance?

[C. Lee Battaglia]

I have severe insomnia and the cause of my insomnia is my night terrors. I know what it's like and know what you have gone through. I'll be happy to take a look into some of your dreams.

Your friend,

C. Lee Battaglia

[Natasha]

I appreciate it!

[JPDonelan]

An interesting intro, though I feel it gets bogged down early for a couple of reasons That I'll go into. Not a bad idea for an intro.

That said, on to my feedback.

I feel you went a little heavy on the rhetorical questions, particularly when you started interlacing them with something that looked a lot like narrative.

What doesn't help is shifting from "your" to "I" all of a sudden, though this is more a victim of my next point (that and Barleygirl more or less hit this on the head).

Some of what I am going to say is going to sound a lot like what JayG said below, but I'll try to unpack my thinking so as to not just circle an already touched on subject.
My first observation of this introduction was the lack of formatting, specifically paragraphing. There are a few reasons that this is crucial, in a general sense, and for this part more pointedly. By breaking a piece into paragraphs (be they small or large) it makes the writing more easily read and helps avoid turning people away at first glance.
There are also how paragraphing can influence the impact on the reader. Changes in paragraph, such as suddenly going from a series of medium to long paragraphs to one or two that are only a sentence long, can emphasize the disparate paragraph, the words in it, and the meaning behind those words.
A brief look through the rest of Dream Journal shows that this paragraph situation is limited to the intro. This is a problem, as people tend to start with the intro. This is your chance to grab their attention and keep it, get them moving to the next chapter. As such, mu suggestion here is to just pay this part a quick visit and see if you can de-block-of-text this part.

There are some sentences that I feel would benefit from different word choices. Take the sentence "Only the ones that are messed up, including me." for example. The phrase "including me" comes off as an example of the rest of the sentence and so the phrasing here throws the flow off some. Keeping it consistent, you could go with "like me", which would accomplish your goal with the sentence while being a little more poignant.

On a similar vein, some of your sentences contain unneeded words which weigh the read down. The worst of the lot (in my opinion) came in the first sentence, so I'll use that as an example. The section reading "Have you ever had a nightmare that as so vivid that...", aside from the typo with "was" contains unneeded words. As written, the words "that as" can be cut without affecting the sentence's meaning. This was the most egregious of what I saw, with many of the others being largely serviceable, if a little loose. Sometimes that is alright, we just be aware of when we let a sentence be loose and when it just happens.
Suggestion here is to just take another look and see what words and phrases don't really carry their weight. You don't need to cut all such instances, but be aware of why those words are there and what they add to the sentence (such as addition to meaning or sentence/word flow).

As I said, this is an interesting intro that puts a good amount of self out before the audience. With some fine tuning, this would be a fine introduction to what follows.

[SJ Mullins]

Writing can be the best therapy. Accolades to you for facing it head on. And yes, I have had them continue.

[barleygirl]

This is an interesting & unusual beginning . . . I'm hooked. You've done a good job of proposing many ideas of how dreams come & how they feel. I like opening with a direct question to the reader using the pronoun "you" . . . a few of these questions are good, thought-provoking . . . but I find that using the pronoun "you" starts to feel like this is about the reader, not the narrator. I think at some point earlier on, you could make the switch to using the pronoun "I" instead of "you" . . . which in my humble opinion would make this feel more immediate, more pressing, more intense. Using "I" instead of "you" for the bulk of this would suggest that it's a real story you are going to tell us, instead of being simply a bunch of rhetorical questions. This is just an idea. But all in all, very much liking this opening & wanting to read on . . .

[Natasha]

Thank you for the feedback, I'll definitely revise it a lot.

[JayG]

Without paragraphing this is all but unreadable.

But that aside, suppose the reader, in response to the question, says no? I haven't had that kind of nightmare? Asking rhetorical questions of a reader are always chancy.

My personal opinion is that here, you're telling the reader what you''re going to tell them. Your goal isn't to make the reader know that your nightmares fill you with terror. It's to terrorize the reader, and make them afraid to turn out the light—as-an-entertainment. So in reality, only the last three sentences matter.

[Natasha]

I understand that maybe a few questions need to be removed, but they are there to make the reader think.

And this whole book is based on me and my nightmares. My goal is to both terrify the readers, and then at the end tell them a little excerpt about how it pertains to me and how it terrified me.

[JayG]

Readers don't come to you to be made to think, they're looking for entertainment. In the words of James H. Schmitz, “Don’t inflict the reader with irrelevant background material—get on with the story.”

[WoodenChair]

Reading this gives me the shivers, i once woke in a panic that i hadn't set a stop loss on a share that was tipped to collapse after it's peak, couldn't get back to sleep until i'd logged into my trading account and checked that i'd actually set it. That was a long night, couldn't get back to sleep anyway, stayed up until the markets opened and sold first thing. One of the worst nightmares i ever had!

[Red Raven]

dreams is like a mirror of your brain. you cannot run away from nightmares. the only weapon to tackle with it is by tackling your real life. winning obstacles and fear.
its a good read. thank you.

[Natasha]

Thannk you

[pia]

I remember my first lucid dreaming.....actually it was more like sleep paralysis omf i was so scared....cuz literally after my first one
I had terrifying experiences.....there was a point that they got so bad i stopped sleeping alone...id just get up in the middle of the night and run into my parents room and sleep on the floor cuz hell no
I aint dealing with that
Anyway... i loveeee this...im always drawn towards terrifying things...(end up regretting it in the middle of the night)
But im super excited to read more now
Good job

[Natasha]

Thank you!

[Coyote Poetry]

I do believe in dreams. Dreams are warnings for the good days or bad days a-coming. Bad dreams mean we are in a stressful place. I look forward to reading this story. Thank you Natasha for sharing the excellent opening chapter.
Coyote