Most magazines pay by the word, but sometimes even doubling up on your adverbs won’t help you break that magic-million mark. How else can you fill the pages you’ll need to pay down that Porsche? That, dear wreater, is why Gutenberg invented the dream sequence.

Ooh! Dreeeeam sequence!

Some authors choose to “reverse-engineer”* one of the many sober, objective dream interpretation books on the market. If one wants to symboblize a penis, for example, one could use a snake, a pencil, a toothbrush, a remote control, a key, the letter I, or any of thousands of vaguely cylindrical objects we encounter every day. After all, our formative years were spent around lots of penises! Am I right? I’m right.

Of course, interpretative books with scanty indexing may require significant work to find the right symbiology. As we should know by now, work is the opposite of writing! Instead, google “dream journal” and grab about two things from every result you find. Don’t forget to change the names–unless you forget on purpose!

To help you get started, here are some useful common elements:

  • Uncles
  • Running but not going anywhere (isn’t that scary? It’s scary!)
  • A hunchback
  • Your mom
  • This one house you went to but now it looks completely different
  • Freud seriously said your mom
  • Nudity
  • People who are also other people
  • Freud was like the Tupac of his generation, kids

Once you’re published, your consumers may pay a lot of attention to your dream sequences. If they don’t like what they find there, remind them that it’s just a dream! It doesn’t mean anything! Except hilarity! If they claim that you’re just writing nonsense to pad your word count, point out that it is way deeper than them, and that they just don’t get your symbliography. It’s true.

* Translation: “drive backwards.”

Today’s Hack in a Nutshell: Nothing you can “wrighte” is “wronge!”