Supercharge your writing with Dreamwork & Archetypes
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
Some of my very best and most profitable book and script ideas have come from dreams, and I always find that interacting with my dreams helps my writing process. For me:
Remember dreams = good writing day.
No dream recall = not so guaranteed.
As I tell my workshop writers:
If you’re not keeping a dream journal, you’re working too hard!
But of course, as with any meditative/spiritual practice, my commitment to dreamwork waxes and wanes with what’s going on in my life.
I’ve been delighted that a couple of things converged this week to launch me straight back into a dream practice.
1. I’ve been completely inspired by the staggeringly rich symbolism and layers of meaning packed into Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show. It has the resonant quality of a really juicy dream, and just like with dreams, new connections and meanings keep occurring to me about the show.
2. I’ve started taking a dreamwork workshop with the always enlightening Alyssa Polizzi.
Alyssa’s workshop came along just as I set an intention to get back into dreamwork (thanks, Universe!) —for quite a few reasons. Winter is SUCH a good time for a dream practice because hey, who wants to get out of bed to face the dark and cold? We sleep longer in the dark months, which often results in richer dreams. I definitely want to tap into that.
And now that Craig and I have sold our new Lost Highway series and are launching into rewrites, I want to dig way down deeper into the archetypal levels that are already there in Book 1, but can be so much more vividly developed, now that the actual PLOT is working!
I’m also writing a new Huntress Moon book this year, and I want to reactivate the archetypes and the dreamlike quality that are the basis of that series.
And maybe most importantly, I feel an urgency to do better work, deeper work because of the darkness sweeping through the US. This is no time for shallow thinking. We need to summon ALL our personal power to fight this coup — in outward activism and through inner work.
I’ve written about archetypes before:
And in both Screenwriting Tricks workbooks, I talk about the archetypes working in every movie I analyze:
Archetypes and fairy tale imagery are why I’m always referring to Silence of the Lambs and The Hunger Games as examples:
— Silence of the Lambs breakdown
— The Hunger Games breakdown
— The Hunger Games video discussion
If you want a crash course in Jungian archetypes, I strongly recommend you start with The Wizard of Oz, which I break down in both workbooks. It’s a movie we all know really, really well — but most of us haven’t viewed it looking at it as a textbook in Jungian psychology! It’s also particularly relevant because it is a passionately anti-authoritarian story, coming out of the previous great swell of fascism.
In fact, maybe I’ll post that breakdown here next week.
Stealing Hollywood Chapter 50, The Wizard of Oz
So how do we work with this archetype thing in our own books and dreams?
For me, to activate my dreams and invite the archetypes to come out and play, I need to reacquaint myself with the archetypes that are so key to my current books. It’s easy to forget just how much I have going throughout the series.
So like this:
My Huntress Moon series is not a paranormal fantasy - it’s an FBI police procedural thriller, based on real-life crimes, real criminal psychology, and real-life investigative techniques and laws. But archetypal, the killer, Cara, is a straight up Artemis: goddess of the hunt. She is literally called the Huntress — a defender of women and children, a virgin goddess (not literally, but unpartnered) who lives by the moon.
Roarke, the FBI agent who hunts her but understands her maybe too well, is her archetypal twin, Apollo: the rational man of light (who then gets metaphorically pulled into her Underworld) — but is himself a protective god who wards off evil, and especially known to be a protector of children.
It’s a dark crime series that has always also attracted a lot of romance readers because of that intense twin bond between Roarke and Cara, and I’ve also always looked at their relationship as that very romantic Platonian idea that we all have another half, from whom we were separated at creation and who we spend the rest of our lives looking for.
Cara also has resonance of:
The Skeleton Woman that Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about so beautifully in Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Persephone, the child was kidnapped into the Underworld by Hades, who grows up to rule that Underworld
Hecate, the goddess associated with magic, witchcraft, the night, crossroads, and the underworld
Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, death, destruction - and transcendental knowledge
And Roarke has a lot of the Apollonian/Dionysian conflict at work in him. In his job he is the golden, rational Apollo; but Cara brings out his darker, uncontrolled, irrational and almost psychic Dionysian side.
Our new Lost Highway series is also lifted straight out of Greek archetypes: Lou Gomersall is Demeter, the universal mother, who roams the earth (in the family RV) in search of her abducted daughter Persephone — stolen by a modern Hades.
And of course there are other archetypes scattered throughout in both series: Hecate, Mentor, Hades, Crones, Hestia, Tiresias, the Triple Goddess. I don’t at all limit myself to Greek archetypes, either: I’ve used, just off the top of my head: Santa Muerte, from Mexican folklore; Jung’s idea of the Anima and Animus; Native American goddess Spider Grandmother; Hindu Devi; various voodoo Loa: Erzulie, Baron Samedi, Papa Legba; tons of Tarot archetypes; and Alice in Wonderland references.
We happen to be currently working on the dreaded Author Questionnaire — that monster of a document publishers and marketing departments have authors fill out for every new book, including synopses, premises, strap lines and pitches for the book at about a dozen different word counts. (I keep telling you all — you need to be collecting those long before you sell your book! – Write a Synopsis - That Sells!)
And just starting on that questionnaire made me realize how much I need to reconnect with the archetypes in both series, to fully bring out the unconscious levels working in those stories, and even maybe to trigger that archetypal resonance with our marketing copy.
By writing this post, I’m deliberately reacquainting myself with the archetypes that are the baseline of both stories. And by focusing on my dreamwork at night, I’m inviting those archetypes to come back into my dreams to populate and enrich my writing.
You can do it, too!
This is what you have to know. Dreams and the writing process are wondrously malleable and interactive. If you just ask for help with symbols, imagery, archetypes – then your creative brain, or the unconscious, or your Muse, or the Universe, or elves – whatever you want to call those helpers who actually do the heavy lifting of our writing — will get right to work showering you with inspiration.
I am not kidding.
Try it!
What are the archetypes you have powering your current book or script? Write them out in detail.
Could your story benefit from using others?
For ideas, as always, I highly recommend Jean Shinola Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman, and (less so) Gods in Everyman; Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With the Wolves; anything by Marion Woodman, like The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter; Barbara G. Walker’s The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and any Joseph Campbell. But just any enclyclopedia of mythology is a good start!
Do you work with your dreams? Should you maybe give it a try?
Also – if this post is not where you’re at at this moment - I’ve done a lot of writing this week, in different directions. So you have a lot of stuff to choose from!
It’s February, so if you’re in that Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras mood (or to get you into it)— here are Ten Romantic Movies to Help You Write Your Book!
Here’s why everyone and especially writers should watch Kendrick Lamar’s epic halftime show.
I’ve added to my Marketing 101 — Mailing Lists and Newsletters post, and will continue those posts in coming weeks.
Want to see some of the archetypes I use in action?
All Huntress books free on Kindle Unlimited:’
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Get the workbooks:
Stealing Hollywood ebook, $4.99, also available as print workbook
Writing Love ebook, $2.99
Need some help? The Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop is available online, as a self-paced course with all the videos, assignments, movie breakdowns and personalized feedback you need to get that book written this year. In three parts, and you only pay for what you use.
One-on-one coaching also available in The Writers’ Room.
All material ©Alexandra Sokoloff, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors