Fool’s stories

This started a couple weeks ago when I had a dream.  In this dream, a giant dog was destroying cities.  By giant, I mean this dog could have easily chewed up Godzilla.  All of our guns and bombs were useless against it.  But then, this old guy from a retirement home stepped up and wrestled it into submission, or maybe killed it.  This turned out to be an immortal Gilgamesh, who had just been laying low for the last few thousand years.

I woke up, and in my semi-wakeful grogginess, I thought it would make a perfect story.  I did notice the issue that Gilgamesh didn’t become immortal in his Epic, but figured he just didn’t want to have to deal with everyone bugging him on how to be immortal, so the version of the story he told was that he didn’t become immortal.  I then tried to go back to sleep.

Later, after I had gotten up, I remembered this idea for a story.  But being fully awake, I started finding flaws in the idea.  Like, where did this enormous dog come from?  Even if Gilgamesh was immortal, how did he have the strength to wrestle this million-ton dog?  And how could someone like Gilgamesh just lay low for thousands of years?

This kind of thing happens to me a couple of times a month.  I’ll wake from a weird dream thinking it’ll make a great story, only to realize once I’ve woken up that it doesn’t even make sense as a dream.  And I wondered if there was a term for this … situation.  After some thought, I came up with Fool’s Stories, as in things that look like stories, only to realize they’re not.  Like how Pyrite is sometimes called Fool’s Gold.  Or, should they be called PyWrites?

Anyway, does this ever happen to you, and if so, what do you call it?