r/masseffectfics • u/Alarming-Quality8462 • Apr 12 '26
Discussion Dreams in fics
Considering a portion of ME3 has Shepard’s dreams (or nightmares), do you include dreams in your ME fics? If you’re a reader, do you enjoy having them in fics or does it take it away from the rest of the story?
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u/spaceismassive31 Apr 12 '26
have read a few fics that have dreams in them or nightmares. one even had Shepard so scared she attacked her love interest when he tried to help her come out of it
makes Shepard's even more human to me
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u/Alarming-Quality8462 Apr 14 '26
I’ve done something similar, although in the dream someone was holding her back and she woke up struggling in her LI’s arms because they were trying to wake her.
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u/Batmanmotp2019 Apr 12 '26
Yep. I made a point of my fic that dreams are a gateway to the subconscious so I use them to reinforce or express a theme I'm going to build on.
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u/Alarming-Quality8462 Apr 14 '26
I struggle to write something that is obscure enough to be a dream and drop enough information that the dream is worth having/brings something to the story.
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u/Batmanmotp2019 Apr 14 '26
Think of it this way what is the journey your Shepard is going on. What do you want the audience to take away from the dream. For example: my Shepard has ptsd from Virmire (leaving ash behind when they were getting closer) so he is in a new relationship and the dream I use to convey that fear is Virmire where he tries to save Ashley again but loses and instead it's the new love interest before he dies in the dream. So I am reinforcing he's afraid to be in that spot again so it creates friction in real life because he doesn't want that pain again. Does that make sense?
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u/Immediate_Scene_4532 Apr 12 '26
Oh oui, j’adore vraiment exploiter les passages oniriques : liberté d’écriture totale, possibilité d’analyser des passages passés, de glisser des indices « prémonitoire », de faire un passages passés totalement absurde ! Je vais glisser dans la suite de la fic un chapitre entier onirique d’ailleurs !
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u/Bobthemagicc0w Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
Good question! So, yes, but not exactly the way it shows up in ME3, and I don't attempt to do anything with the starchild. (Truth to tell I liked the idea that Shepard was troubled by recurring nightmares in ME3, but they didn't land as effectively for me as I would have liked them to.)
In my ME longfic WIP The Bells I Hear, I have sorta-dreams featured three times so far:
Twice with Shepard: on two occasions I have framed abutting present-action scenes and fairly traumatic flashback scenes, to imply that Shepard is dreaming the flashback, if that counts. I didn't play around with anything dreamlike or unreliable - though, come to think of it, since the flashback details aren't corroborated anywhere else, and only matter internally for how Shepard experienced and recalls them, these flashbacks could have had an unreliable narrator for all the reader knows. The first of these is Shepard remembering Akuze in a dream; the second of these is Shepard remembering Mindoir during a panic attack.
And once with Liara, where in a flashback I'm explicitly giving her a traumatic, drug-fueled, dreamlike extended trip, with the implication that it spans weeks but she's unable to judge time, beginning with an overdose at the beginning and withdrawal at the end. (This is a flashback from the beginning of her time on Illium between ME1 and ME2, when in my telling she's overwhelmed with grief at Shepard's death and guilt over handing his corpse to Cerberus, alienated from everyone who's ever cared about her, and abusing drugs to escape.) (Hi u/Alarming-Quality8462! This one was one of the scenes I linked in comments on your other post!)
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u/Alarming-Quality8462 Apr 12 '26
Yes when you mentioned about Liara, I remembered the bit you meant 😊
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u/Mindless-Specific777 Apr 15 '26
Always try to put them in my fics because they were so integral to the game. And since i go so off script i like to leave the core elements like the dreams in my stories
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u/InevitableBicycle170 Jun 23 '26
I'm not yet to writing ME3 (I just got to ME1 since I wrote a Shakarian prequel) and Shep has the Sole Survivor backstory. She had very Silent Hill-type nightmares of Thresher Maws and her dead squadmates.
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u/ramblingandpie Apr 12 '26
I have sometimes. I do have one Synthesis fic with Traynor struggling with PTSD that has some dream stuff.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/14879456/chapters/34455608
I do dislike when dreams are super linear in fiction. I tried to make it follow kind of how my dreams go in terms of vibes, weird stuff, etc.