My wife and I our currently in Korea, teaching a creativity camp for tweens and teens. We’re combing writing, art, prop building, and acting to provide the students with a week of intensive creativity!
One of our opening activities was based around the idea of bottling dreams. Students brainstormed characters, focusing on their fears and nightmares. The students then “built” the nightmares by imagining that they had been bottled.
Students could be as literal or symbolic as they wished. I brought a lot of general supplies such as black sand, hair, cotton, and feathers, all of which could be trimmed or stretched to represent the negative qualities of nightmares. There were also some more “on-the-nose” objects, such as plastic bugs and snakes!
For story purposes, those bottles get accidentally opened, unleashing story inspiration!
Here are some photos of the students’ bottles and brainstorming . . .
Between the Cracks of Here and There 
Seeing this makes me wish I’d taken this sort of class as a kid. Perhaps I should let my inner child out to play more often. But not the nightmares from the bottle! I spent too much time cramming them in there from the last time they got loose!
Never too late to let that inner child free!
Too busy corralling the outer child…but maybe when I hit my second childhood, it could happen!