Going to bed on time. Got all the laundry done and the sheets on the bed are NEW…fixin to get a good night’s sleep.
I had a nightmare last night that kind of matched the book I’m reading. First time that’s even happened to me! It’s also the first time that I’ve read Stephen King, which is odd, because I wouldn’t say this book is all that scary. But I had the nightmare nonetheless. It was a little funny, because the nightmare wasn’t exactly a nightmare. I was literally WATCHING a scary movie in my dream and realizing that the movie was pretty good. It was pretty scary. And then I realized, in the middle of the dream, that this concept would make a fun story, one I should write.
Of course, I can’t quite tell you what the story was. It faded pretty quickly as I woke up. But there are a few things that stuck out—a man with no face, sometimes with a burlap sack over his head, sometimes with that burlap sack with a face and an evil grin painted on it, and then sometimes just like his face was made of pencil lead, and he’d been messily erased. And he vibrated when you looked at him. And I also remember that you were supposed to say certain words to protect yourself against him, but the twist of the “movie” was that was a lie—those words actually summoned him to you. And then, finally, that the movie—which turned into a book midway through the dream as my conscious mind realized I was dreaming and was like “hey, this is good stuff for a story”—broke the fourth wall, made me part of it, or the reader/viewer by proxy, and the evil man was now summoned to ME. Or you, just for reading, or watching.
I woke feeling like Stephen King. Like…thinking THIS is how he comes up with his stories. He dreams. And then he writes down the good stuff. You have to be genuinely terrified by your own story if you have any chance of scaring anyone else…and that’s what I felt, waking up in the middle of the night, and my writer brain racing. The dream was scary. That dark man was SCARY. And that’s what made it a good thing to remember for a story. I’ve never written a scary story. But I’ve never really read one, either. So this is all new.
I went back to sleep, not looking at the black corners of our bedroom, because the blackness is terrifying. There’s evil in there we can’t quite see, but we know it’s there.