Posts Tagged ‘Inception’
Friday, March 25th, 2011
It’s easy to forget our feelings. In fact, many of us prefer it. Except… Our dreams tend to take their own path when we sleep, and often they time travel–as my psychic twins experience all over again in Secret Legacy. Things that we’ve forgotten we’ve thought or felt in the past come back to us in our dreams. Something in life turns our mind back, and our sleeping world follows. There’s something we haven’t dealt with, something we must feel from that time.
In Dark Legacy, yesterday dreams were how one twin (the psychotic one ;o) finds her sister again and begs for her help. You know, while she’s trying to kill her and everyone she feels has abandoned her to her terrifying gifts and the government scientists experimenting on them. In Book 2, Secret Legacy, now that Sarah Temple’s free of her mad scientists and her mind is healing (or so she thinks), dreams from the past come for her again–only this time under someone else’s control. Discovering who’s using a secret child to send Sarah to the brink of madness once more becomes an odyssey in facing the past and the emotions and the near childhood breakdown she’s forgotten all these years is the only way she’ll save herself and her twin, the child whose amazing mind is being weaponized, and every dreamer that could become the next dream target.
Lucky for us, others aren’t driving what we remember in dreams (at least, most of the time they’re not). Unlucky for us, we don’t have a brotherhood of watchers helping us decode the symbols and images, the clues, our sleeping minds leave to help us figure out what we need to deal with so we can see more clearly how our past is forming our future.
Our dreams are, more often than not, showing us what’s happening in our subconscious minds when we’re awake. (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dark Legacy, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, lucid dreaming, parapsychology, precognition, psychic, psychic children, Psychic Realm, psychokinesis, Secert Legacy
Posted in Dream Theories | 8 Comments »
Friday, March 18th, 2011
“We teach others how to treat us,” I told a group of students last weekend, when we shifted into the communication skills portion of our weekend together. In the Psychic Realm I’ve created in my Legacy novels (and in the fringe science I base my psychic world building on) our minds teach our dreams how to transport us while we sleep. Our “every day” programs our resting realities.
I’ve promised for a while now to post regularly about what I’ve learned writing Secret Legacy and what I’ve created in both it and it’s sister book, Dark Legacy. We’re grooving toward an exciting May/June launch/re-launch season for both projects, so let’s get busy talking about the spooky and not-so-spooky stuff that enthralls me about the mind’s power to create.
Yes, our dreams are for encoding memories and filtering out the chatter and rebooting for a new conscious day. But sometimes the unconscious noise is too important to move on from, no matter how determined we are to lock it away. And it’s these the seeds from which our strongest, most recurring dreams evolve.
As we stay unaware when we’re awake, our dreams tend to crank up the dial on dealing with whatever need/goal/fear is being repressed. They actually take on the challenge of getting us back on the track of facing the inevitable truth, that the energy we most avoid is the reality we most need to confront. So we do. Over and over. In dream cycles that keep the emotions of whatever’s challenging us in the forefront of our minds, even if we turn away from the details themselves.
Does this mean we’re subconsciously programming the very dreams we need, in order to confront our demons?
Some believe so.
No, not THAT somebody, but it is a cool album. You should check it out ;o)
In Secret Legacy, the programming is more intentional. (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dark Legacy, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, lucid dreaming, parapsychology, precognition, psychic, psychic children, psychokinesis, Secert Legacy
Posted in Dream Theories | No Comments »
Monday, March 7th, 2011
A great comment came in last week–that the lead characters in Inception were merely a band of thugs raping people’s minds to get what they wanted. The commenter poses an interesting question: Is doing something wrong ever right, because you believe it’s the only viable choice?
It’s the EXACT moral (psychic) delima that was the original idea for my Legacy series.I wanted realistic lead characters facing complex delimas for which there are no easy resloution. Because even good people make bad choices sometimes. I’m not sure Inception’s creators were going for the same thing, but there are parallels, nonetheless.
I’ve started a conversatin about this very thing, BTW, over on Kindle Boards, so stop by and chat a bit out there, too.
What’s your take?Not just about either Inception or the Legacy books–though they offer a great framework for the topic. What are you looking for in a book that explores the epic dynamic of good vs. evil, only the good guys are not all that good and the bad guys are doing what they’re doing for causes they find just (they’re true believers). (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dark Legacy, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, Secert Legacy
Posted in Dream Theories | 3 Comments »
Friday, March 4th, 2011
I get a lot of emails asking to know more about how my Legacy Series is similar to the popular movie Inception.My first thought when this happens is that Dark Legacy sold and was published long before the movie–so why isn’t everyone asking how Inception is similar to my popular Legacy Series of novels?
Of course I love to hear everyone’s thoughts–even those who dig the movie more ;o) So keep emailing. But it’s especially cool to get feedback from those who’ve seen the movie AND read the first book. I’m dying to know more about what you think about Secret Legacy, which is FINALLY out in May. So, here’s a place to leave those comments. Let ‘er rip!
I’ll give you some highlights to work from–the cool things in both Inception and Dark and Secret Legacy that you’re not seeing out there an anything else right now.
Dream Theory
____________
People can’t get enough of the parapsychology and metaphysics behind the movie and my Legacy novels.Including me! I’m currently reading books on particle physics as I work on proposals for new Legacy family (and what I’ll be pitching for books 3 – 5). It’s technical stuff that a new sci-fi/fantasy audience will dig while others might find it to much. But the thing about Inception and the Legacy series is that everyone who’s seen and read them thinks is–Cool! Even people who think the premise of both is too fast paced and complicated, are fascinated with the dream theory and the frantic speed of the the scenes that give us amazing images to explain just our sleeping minds work. (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, clairsentience, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, parapsychology, precognition, psychic, psychic children, psychokinesis, Secert Legacy
Posted in Dream Theories | 12 Comments »
Friday, February 18th, 2011
I dreamed last night…Can’t tell you how many times my husband’s found me trying to wake up over my first can of Diet Coke in the morning, realized I’m more tired than normal, even though chronic insomnia isn’t anything new for me, and heard me say, “I dreamed last night…”
Yeah, now that you ask, my fascination with the dream theory and the metaphysical, parapsychological mysteries I weave my fantasy stories around often find their genesis in early morning, shadowy moments. The mind is an amazing, complicated pain in the ass sometimes, and I can’t help but want to know more. Even when I’m finding it hard to pry my eyelids open on heavy mornings. It’s almost like being hung over, except there was no alcohol involved in this cycle. This circuit, if you will. A dream circuit that replays itself regularly through my valuable sleep patterns, when I actually do find myself sleeping. Damn it ;o)
It’s almost like the dreams have a mind of their own. Almost like they’re in control of the shadows of my sleep, working through the things I need to work out while I’m waking, but I’m not paying close enough attention then because I can distract myself with whatever “physical” things I need to to keep the metaphysical at bay. (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, clairsentience, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, parapsychology, precognition, psychic, psychic children, psychokinesis, Secert Legacy
Posted in Dream Theories | 10 Comments »
Monday, February 14th, 2011
As a fantasy/paranormal reader, what makes you “buy” into a story’s alternate reality? As a fantasy/paranormal writer, how do you earn that commitment from your fans? How do you, like in Book 1 and 2 of my Legacy series (or the movie Inception), take concept like dream theory and spin an alternative world (in my case, a Psychic Realm) out if it that’s so real, a reader could see it as her own?
As for me, let’s start with some of the more obvious techniques I see out there:
1) Cool! Fantasy/paranormal readers crave the cool factor in their entertainment. As a writer, do your research (I have an entire shelf and a full “favorites” browser folder of dream research). If you veer toward sci-fi like Inception and my Legacy series do, understand the science behind the concepts your manipulating as best you can. Then ramp it up several levels.
Go for the new (which I thought I had four years ago when I started writing Dark Legacy). Then we saw Inception last year and I sat through it saying, “Cool!” over and over as the same lucid dreaming techniques and “psychic’s manipulating reality through dreams,” and “dreamers losing control of the physical world because they’re not sure when they’re dreaming or not” concepts I used play out on the screen in an even more vivid way. Go for the cool.
Those of you who saw Inception, (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, parapsychology, psychic, Psychic Realm, Secert Legacy, writing articles
Posted in Dream Theories | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 7th, 2011
Secret Legacy takes my Dream Theory research deeper–playing with the space time continuum in a way that made my editor nervous until we agreed that SL was pushing even further into the fantasy genre than Dark Legacy did. That the particle physics and precognition and the law of causality and something called Maxwell’s Theory I was continuing to base my evolving stories on were here to stay, or I couldn’t finish the project. A project that challenges readers to wonder whether one moment can cause the next, or if the effect of our actions can be predetermined and or changed in the past regardless of what whe choose to do here and now…
Let’s face it, we realized. My Legacy books were never urban fantasy or technically even paranormal romance. There was psychic war and relationships and lots of “on the run” suspense and even mystery. But what drove my imagination as I wrote, and the readers who enjoyed the first story, was the science behind what was happening in my characters heads, and through their minds and emotions onto the page. I was crafting plots around the plausibility, no matter how faint, that there were real world explanations for the freaky things occurring in our reality that could be fictionalized on a grander scale, for kicks and giggles, into the larger-than-life realities of my characters.
And that, I was almost the last to realize even though I read the genre like an addict as a young adult, is fantasy. Sort of. It’s the kind of contemporary, parallel-reality fantasy I want to write, anyway (with a hint of science fiction and a heavy dose of the community and relationships that have driven my other work).
One genre clearly isn’t enough for the concepts I play with. (more…)
Tags: Anna DeStefano, contemporary fantasy, creativity & inspiration, Dream Theories, dreams, fantasy author, Inception, Legacy Series, parapsychology, precognition, psychic, psychic children, psychokinesis, writing articles
Posted in Dream Theories | 4 Comments »
