Coma

The Big Sleep was always death, but it would perhaps be a better description of coma. I wonder whether Danny could, as a result of a car accident or a disease, be plunged into a coma - and so into a potentially inescapable dreamland.

I had a thought about him reaching a point (a bit like It's A Wonderful Life) whee he feels his parents – specifically his Mum – aren't interested in him. He feels depressed and taken for granted. Perhaps there's something going on with his parents he isn't aware of, or which he only vaguely understands, and it means they're distracted. Their love and approval is so important to him, this new distraction feels like a betrayal.

Is the new distraction a pregnancy? Or some problem that's arisen – a 'grown-ups issue'?

By the time whatever event it is occurs, and he enters the coma, he feels pushed aside and forgotten – and he's also become familiar with dreamland, to the point where it offers a useful escape for him. But the coma means it's an escape he may never be able to undo. Lots of children feel they want to escape their parents – but would be terrified if they were to succeed, for good.

In the coma, Danny comes to face death, and/or his fear of death. I'll do a separate post about this sequence, which I've had going round in my head for a while. But he also comes to the Room of Strange Doorways, and is allowed access to his mother's dreams.

His mother, of course, is in hell: her cherished child is hovering at death's door. In her dreams, which focus entirely on this dread and nascent grief, he is shocked and terrified by her feelings – he had no idea she could feel this way. He sees her love for him: a well as deep as the stars. And her fear for him: a flint blade pressed to her heart. This is where he discovers there is no world as foreign as the inside of someone else's head – but also the truth about how human beings carry each other around within themselves.

It's this astonishing discovery that inspires his climb out of the coma.

An outline...

We need a spine for the story. I see it being quite episodic, which is almost dictated by the subject: you sleep, you wake, you sleep, you wake. But it still needs a strong throughline.

I had an idea for this, but I'm not sure I really want to make it as sad as this! Alec, see what you think.

My thought was that Danny's mother gets pregnant. It's all very exciting. Shortly befor she announces this impending arrival, Danny starts having his incredibly vivid – lucid – dreams. He meets the Rag and Bone Man, and sees himself in the night mirror. He enters dreamland, and is befriended by the guide character, whom for some reason I want to call Kipper. So let's use that for now.

The pregnancy continues, and Danny has some terrific adventures with Kipper. (I know, we need to say what those are – essentially it's his (and the reader's) introduction to our central notion of dreamland. The place you can do anything, but where you're not altogether in control.)

The baby comes, perhaps prematurely, and immediately there are concerns. Danny has his first dream in which Kipper dies. (Yep, Kipper is a personification of the baby.)

The baby gets very sick, and the Eden of the great rambling artistic home starts coming apart. Danny's mother is in deep distress, his father retreats into his studio.

At school, people know about the sick baby. Danny is the target for a bully, Nathan, who sees the situation as a good way to get at Danny.

Ultimately, of course, the baby dies. The story reaches its nadir. Mum and Dad in pieces. And in the dreams, Kipper's continuous, and often amusing, deaths, end with one final one. Kipper is really gone. Danny loses his friend.

From there, Danny has to find his way out. Out of the grief and blackness. He has to face his fear of death. And somehow he has to save his parents from their grief. This is where the Room of Strange Doorways comes in. Danny has to find out what's really going on with Mum and Dad. He has to go inside their heads. (Or perhaps just one of their heads.)

The final chapters are the climb away from that awful low point. The arc takes Danny, who is of course also going through the big change of puberty, through an experience of death and grief and out the other side.

I think this could all be very powerful, but I'm not sure I want to write a story quite this dark/serious. Alec, let me know what you think.

Danny's Guide 2

Alec had the good idea that this guide of Danny's could appear in a different guise in every dream. He/She/It always has similar characteristics, but may be a cat, or a boy, or really odd things like a clock or a boat. It's nice that it supports him in all sorts of ways. The only thing is I'm concerned that it could be seen as close to Philip Pullman's idea of the daemon. But this isn't Danny's soul – in fact, it's not even really part of him. It's an emissary from dreamland, shaping itself to his imagination.

Alec's other interesting idea was that in every dream, this character dies in one way or another. (A bit "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!") Initially, this is awful for Danny – he loses his friend. Ultimately it could become funny – oh, not again!

But this did lead to a rather dark potential storyline - see the next post.

Danny's parents

I'd like to give Danny an unusual background. His parents are both a little nutty – they're artists, I think. His Dad's a sculptor, who creates strange, abstract things in his studio in the garden. His Mum, I think, is a writer, as well as a teacher. She brings in the bacon. His Dad's the more obsessive one.

I've always loved the David Bowie song, Kooks. I imagine his parents like this: "a couple of kooks, hung up on romancing." They adore Danny, but they have their own way of showing it.

They all live in a rambling Victorian house that's always untidy and struggling for order. Danny loves it, loves exploring and making hiding places and creating. Danny may have a sibling, perhaps a sister, who is much more fussy and practical, and living in this madhouse drives her potty. Her room is a model of order and good taste. She's not boring – just different. And exasperated with her entire family.

I think somehow Danny has to save his family. That's the story. But from what?

Worlds within worlds

One of the things about many 'other world' books is that the ordinary world starts to feel just that: ordinary. I'd like to retain a sense of wonder at our own world, and the many worlds it contains. For example, the book definitely takes place in winter. Winter is the 'night' of the world, a time of dreams and magic, when the night is given full rein. And that makes it a world in itself – it's utterly different from the stifling, dozy time of Summer, all blowsy and blooming and bright.

Winter is a subtler and oddly more wakeful time. The chill gives you a buzz and sharpens you up, whereas the sun makes you drowsy and slow, like a sleepy bumble bee. I like the idea that Winter, and the night, are both times of heightened awareness, when magic comes to the surface. But it's magic we can all experience. Magic doesn't have to be Narnia and wizards. It can be standing in an open field on a winter's night, among a throng of stars.

Danny's Guide

Danny perhaps has a guide through dreamland. A friend who knows the way. (Another Alice allusion: the Cheshire Cat.) But in his case, it's the imaginary friend he conjures up in his waking hours. Dreamland latches onto this powerful figure in Danny's mind, and the imaginary friend becomes a channel for dreamland to guide Danny along his way.

The Room of Strange Doorways

This was the title of another story that I wrote around the time of The Autumn Girl. It was a light-hearted fantasy tale of a little man who sat at the confluence of all worlds: The Room of Strange Doorways. Here, an infinite number of doors opened onto an infinite number of worlds.

Perhaps there is a similar 'room' in dreamland: a special, even sacred, place, where all dreams converge. A sort of collective unconscious. Normally, one cannot escape one's own dreams and enter someone else's, but I think this may be one of Danny's ultimate tasks. However strange our own dreams are, the strangest world you could ever visit would be somebody else's head – to actually move around inside someone's dreams, memories, thoughts.

It may be that, in order to save someone – his father? – Danny has to enter that person's dreams via this room of strange doorways.