Why Shouldn't You Start a Story With a Dream?
Quick answer: Starting a story with a dream risks a broken promise: the reader invests in events that turn out not to count. Why editors warn against it, and the exceptions.
You are warned against starting a story with a dream because it makes the reader invest in events that turn out not to count. The opening pages are where trust is built; a dream opening spends that trust on stakes, dangers and images that evaporate at the words 'and then she woke'. The reader must start again from zero, now warier, having learned that this writer's dramatic scenes may be refundable.
The warning is about undisclosed dreams, the kind played as reality and revealed as illusion. Dreams themselves are ancient, legitimate material; fiction from Genesis to Dostoevsky runs on them. The sin is not dreaming. It is the bait-and-switch, and understanding exactly why it fails tells you exactly when it can succeed.
The longer answer: a broken contract on page one
An opening is a contract: these people are real in the story's terms, these events have consequences, your attention will be repaid. The undisclosed dream voids all three clauses at once. Whatever tension the nightmare built vanishes; whatever character the reader met may bear no relation to the waking one; whatever world was established is replaced by another. Few devices can waste a reader's first two minutes so completely.
The damage compounds because openings are also diagnostic. Agents and slush readers see false-alarm dream openings so often that the device signals inexperience regardless of execution, a writer reaching for cheap drama because the real story starts slow. Fair or not, the association exists, and a submission spends its first page fighting it.
There is a structural cost too. Dream openings usually exist because the actual opening lacks tension, and they treat the symptom. After the wake-up, the slow scene the writer was avoiding still arrives, now burdened by an annoyed reader. The honest fix was always to give the waking story a stronger first page, not to borrow one from the subconscious.
The exceptions, and why they work
Daphne du Maurier opens Rebecca (1938) with the narrator dreaming of Manderley, and it is one of the most celebrated openings in English fiction. Note what she does not do: there is no deception. The first line announces the dream as a dream, and the passage works as mood, mystery and aftermath, a woman haunted by a place, which is the novel's exact subject. Disclosed dreams that characterise the dreamer break no contract.
Genre frames change the rules as well. In fantasy and horror where dreams are prophetic, shared or invaded, dream events do count: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a dream, openly framed; A Christmas Carol runs on visions whose consequences are real by morning. When the story's world grants dreams causal power, dreaming on page one is simply opening in medias res.
And literary fiction earns dream openings when the dream is doing irreplaceable work: revealing a mind's furniture, planting an image the ending will spend, or establishing a narrator for whom inner life outranks outer. The test is substitution: if a waking scene could deliver the same material, the dream is decoration; if nothing else could, it is design.
What to do instead, or how to do it anyway
If your draft opens with a false-alarm nightmare, find what the dream was compensating for. Usually it is a first scene without pressure. Move the disturbance earlier, start closer to the trouble, or open inside the character's real fear rather than its symbolic rerun. The dream's imagery can often be salvaged as memory, association or a single unsettling line.
If you keep a dream, disclose it immediately and keep it short. Signal within the first sentence that we are dreaming, hold it to a paragraph or two, and make the content pay twice: once as atmosphere now, once as meaning later. A dream that never reconnects to the story is a deleted scene the reader had to read.
And wake with consequence. The strongest dream openings land on a waking world already altered, the dreamer reaching for a phone, checking a door, lying to a spouse about sleeping well. If nothing in reality shifts because of the dream, the story is telling you it did not need it. Contest screeners reading blind will tell you the same thing faster.
Related misconceptions
'Never write dreams at all' overcorrects. Mid-story dreams, disclosed and consequential, are a standard tool: Raskolnikov's dream of the beaten horse in Crime and Punishment (1866) is among the most analysed scenes in the novel, and it works precisely because by then we know the dreamer and the dream changes him. Position and honesty, not dreams, were always the issue.
'It worked for a famous book, so it works' skips the mechanism. Rebecca disclosed; Wonderland framed; prophetic dreams operate in worlds that empower them. Citing exceptions without their conditions is how workshop rules turn into workshop accidents.
'Readers cannot tell until the wake-up' is exactly the problem. They cannot, which is why they feel handled afterwards. Fiction's one unforgivable trick is making the audience's investment retroactively worthless; every other rule about openings is negotiable before that one.
What poets can take from this
- If the dream is a surprise, cut it; if it is disclosed, earn it.
- Never spend more than two paragraphs asleep in an opening.
- Salvage dream imagery as memory or association instead of staged sequence.
- Let the dream leave fingerprints on the waking scene it precedes.
- When tempted by a nightmare opening, write the feared event as reality and see if that is your true first scene.
Try it yourself
Write two openings for the same story about a person awaiting biopsy results. Version one: an undisclosed nightmare, then the wake-up. Version two: the character awake at 4 a.m., doing something ordinary with shaking hands. Compare which version makes the fear real, and notice what the dream was standing in for.
Questions
Can a whole story be a dream?
It can, but the all-a-dream twist ending carries the same penalty as the dream opening multiplied: everything the reader invested in is revoked at once. Openly framed dream narratives like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland avoid the problem by never pretending otherwise.
Why do so many manuscripts start with dreams or waking up?
Because drafts often begin before the story does, and waking is the writer's own starting ritual projected onto the character. It is a natural first-draft move; the professional step is recognising it as scaffolding and cutting to the real opening in revision.
Are dream sequences ever required?
In some genres, effectively yes: prophetic and shared dreams are structural in much fantasy and horror, and psychological fiction may need the subconscious on the page. The craft standard stays constant, though: disclosed framing and consequences the waking story honours.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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