While in coma, a pessimistic former athlete must regain his self belief to help a police force, that operates within collective unconscious of humanity, stop a powerful psychic taking over everybody’s minds.
KnightriderMentor
While in coma, a pessimistic former athlete must regain his self belief to help a police force, that operates within collective unconscious of humanity, stop a powerful psychic taking over everybody’s minds.
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I like the seed-concept, a story that leverages Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, but…
For one thing, why a coma? ?Couldn’t these “adventures” take place while he’s asleep? ?Which would create additional complications and tension. Because 2/3 of his time would be spent “out of commission” — waking life — unable to engage with the psychic daemonic-shadow figure.
Add to that a ticking clock — an urgent need for him to get to sleep early and often — and the complication that he’s an insomniac..
Oh, and an anima-siren/love interest who threatens to lure him to his doom.
As I said, I like the concept, but…
fwiw
Agreed with the above.
Also, the actions will all be in the MC’s mind, much like in Life on Mars, visualized for the audience’s benefit. This can be used as either a twist in the end or an established rule of the story world.
Is the existence of a psychic police force a known aspect of this world? Or is it something they setup once they, somehow, realize there is a psychic predator on the loose?
The reason for my question is that if it is a regular occurrence in this world, to have psychic criminals being chased by psychic police, then why and in what way is this MC so outstanding to require a story being told about him? What’s so special about this particular coma patient?
However, if this is the first time such a psychic criminal has been identified, then the existence of a police force dedicated to catching psychic criminals doesn’t make much sense. It would make more sense that there are other people stuck in comas who are all somehow connected in their psyche and together form a group that go after the powerful psychic.
Another ?thing, because this is a special situation: stopping a psychic who is attacking peoples subconscious. It might help to tell us what special powers the lead character has that will let the reader know, he is the only one who can defeat the bad guy.
You mention that the lead is an athlete but I don’t see how that helps him fight a psychic.
Does the lead come from a family of witches? Was the lead born with psychic powers? Was the lead struck by gamma radiation. Just any little hint on “Why him” will help.
In order to stop a powerful psychic, the lead must “regain his self belief”
That line doesn’t quite connect with me because even if he does regain his self belief how will that stop a powerful psychic.
Is there anything that the lead character must do in order to defeat the psychic? If so I would add that to the logline.
Hi Knightrider. I see lots of references to ‘Carrie’, ‘The Fury’, ‘Dreamspace’ and ‘Inception’ here. I agree with Nicholas that it is confusing. I really like the concept of someone in coma helping the police, but I don’t see why it’s important that the MC is a pessimistic former athlete and that thing about the “collective unconscious of humanity” is difficult to visualize.
So this guy is in a coma, and he must help the police to stop a psychic who aims to control everybody’s minds? Then I think it should read like something like this: “While in a coma, a man with powerful mind skills is recruited by a special police force to stop a mad psychic who is trying to take over the world by controlling everybody’s minds.”
Wow … there’s a lot of new information to process here. The concept sounds interesting, for sure, but maybe you need to dumb the language down so that people get the pitch in a more simplified manner? Instead of “collective unconscious of humanity”, maybe just piggy back on movies we’ve already seen, like Inception, and say something like “shared dream-scape” or “shared dream-land”?
The other problem is that you need to expend so many words on getting the concept across that the stakes as they pertain to your protagonist are not totally clear. Is he in danger of having his mind taken over? Or never waking up? How does this ‘get personal’? The drive is not primal.
Likewise, it’s not clear how this scenario is going to arc your athlete’s pessimism toward optimism. The flaw can usually be used to really enhance the irony of the concept (as in, show why this is the LAST guy you want handling this situation). I think that if it’s not clear, and considering how dense everything else is in this concept, maybe you just need to cut his flaw for brevity’s sake? I know that’s generally a no-no, but again if it’s just creating more confusion than it’s solving, I’d say get rid of it.