capri0mni | Thoughts for the "What if?" file: (Reply)

Fiction writing starts with the single question "What if?" (and then, from there, you have to go on and answer the other five questions: Who? What? Where? When? and Why?).

So here are some "What if?" Questions that bob up from the murky depths of my subconscious, every now and then, that may, or may not, become the starting point for stories:

In dreams, nothing you ever read remains the same for a second reading; the ideas may be related, but the phrasing will be different. What if there was a magical world / alternate reality, where this is what always happened when you read something--if that was just everyday normality for that world's inhabitants?

There exist, in folklore, stories of men who have captured dryads, nymphs, selkies, and the like and forced them to be their wives by trapping them in human form. What if the grand-, or great grandchild of such a union, who had been raised as human, stumbled onto the truth about who (And what) they are?

When I started this post, I had three What ifs in mind. But I can't remember what the third one is, now. [ETA: Okay, now I remember: One of my fictional pet peeves is the "It was all a dream!" trope, because that means that all the previous adventure, in which I, as a reader (or viewer) had invested so much emotional capital suddenly has no consequence, or importance. But what if the things we do in our dream world had real consequences for the people important to us in our waking world? Maybe not a literal, one-to-one correlation (if you die in your dream, you die for real, etc.), but some sort of meaningful consequence?]