Oblong of Dreams

"Where do you get your ideas from?" people often ask me. I've written 500 stories to date in spite of (and I quote my English teacher here) 'no obvious creative ability'. 

The answer is quite simple, I have for the last decade been in possession of a Brompton Dream Manipulator.

Before going to sleep I type in the main prompts for the story I want to write, say a short story set in my university years featuring a girl who lives in a dormobile.

I strap the Brompton DM to my head, and while I sleep I dream a story related to the desired features, setting it to 'record' in case I don't remember my dreams. When I wake I simply type up the dream into story form.  This explains why my stories tend toward the surreal and often end suddenly with an alarm going off.

In spite of these quirks however, the Brompton DM does have significant benefits. Because my stories are dreams there's no need for any chronological consistency. In the dormobile story, for example, the dream is set in my university days, but also features modern day events and references. Such anachronisms are possible in the oblong of dreams.

The Deluxe Brompton has a built-in record feature, which automatically transcribes the dream into story form, but I'm happy with my old model, I enjoy the process of typing up the dream. I'm saving up to buy a Brompton Dream Editor, which automatically edits your dream, but these are quite expensive, so for the time being you'll have to put up with my typos, grammatical errors and the occasional incoherent sentence.

My dream-generated stories have been a great success. Because I am able to set the Brompton to write to a particular theme, it is especially good for themed short story competitions. I won second place in the Bins Out for Summer competition last year, for the best story featuring a dustbin and a famous celebrity, was also runner up in the Your Dachshund competition for short stories about sausage dogs, and third place in an Eric Clapton fan site competition calling for stories featuring the tedious old heroin addict turned vaccine denier.

So successful have I been, in fact, that I have been offered a contract to write a novel by a leading publisher.

Great you think? I wish. The problem is that the Brompton has no facility to continue a story over consecutive nights, each dream is a completely new story, and the most I've ever written in a single night is just over 5,000 words. To write a novel of anything light adequate length I would need to sleep for 17 consecutive days and nights.

So here I go. I've done without sleep for a week, watched a really boring TV programme about castles, have just drunk a bucket of Horlics and have type the words 'award-winning epic novel' into my Brompton.

You'll be the first to read the result here.