My scripts went through many different phases. The main basis of my script was it try not to be about dreams in terms of sleeping but dreams in terms of goals or hopes for something more. This technicality was the only way I felt that I could tell a story that wasn’t honestly horrendous and idiotic. Also, I wanted to make the task meaningful for myself and more based on the things I have been exposed to in my life, so even if I couldn’t get what I wanted out of the task in terms of experience working in a group, I could get something more personal out of it through self-expression.
Despite me saying that the main premise of my story became a common trope that you would find in Japanese romance comics, which was an account of someone confessing to their friend, but in a specific way. I’m a young lad so I relate to it on some level.
When making the script, I wasn’t sure what direction I want to take the tone in. Did I want a jovial tone where it sounds like just one person telling their dream to another, or was it meant to be something most serious than just small talk? At first, I thought it would be better to use the jovial tone as a veil to hide the meaning behind the story with the pauses at certain moments and diegetic sounds to sell the fact that there was more going on, which could be easily understood because these are feelings that everyone has.
What changed my mind was the idea that the script was based on in the first place, taking dreams as more like an unachievable future or goal than REM sleep. So, I leaned into that more.
The story of the script starts with someone talking to someone else about their dream in a jovial tone, being quite brief in the way they describe it and also being quite muddled in the details. Then at one point, the tone changes and it becomes the main character recounting this dream as if it was a lived experience. As if it was something they had been through before. I did this because that’s what made sense, I wanted to make the main character seem as though they had actually lived that dream to sell the fact that they want to lose themselves in a fantasy.
At the end of the piece, there is also the troupe of “it was all a dream” or “then I woke up”, one I wanted to avoid; however, instead of completely destroying any narrative importance that was said previous to the statement, it instead adds to it as the whole point of the piece is that the main character is blurring the lines because the world that he wants to live in is so far out of reach that the only way to live that reality is to dream.