#97

As a writer, there are always certain works that you feel are a cut above your others. That’s how I feel about my novels Killer, Pariah, The Caretaker of Lorne Field, Monster, Everybody Lies in Hell, and Everything Ends Here (now only in German, hopefully that will change soon.) That’s how I feel also about some of my short stories, especially Buxton, Brother’s Keeper, my Julius Katz stories: (Julius Katz and the Case of Exploding Wine, Archie’s Been Stolen!, Julius Katz Gets Arrested), James & Bond, and A Lost Dream.

In a roundabout way, a dream inspired my noirish crime story A Lost Dream. The dream: I was at open mic night at a comedy club waiting to go on, and I was feeling okay about it since I had pages of material written up, and then I noticed the pages were gone and I started to panic, thinking I needed to come up with one joke. In my dream, I forced myself to create a joke which I remembered when I woke almost immediately afterward.

The joke: My therapist told me do this open mic night. Her exact words: Go bother someone else for a change.

While I can’t prove I hadn’t heard that joke before and it wasn’t buried in my subconscious, I’m pretty sure I never did. That I was able to force myself to create something in a dream astounded me. I told a good friend about this, and he told me about a composer named Giuseppe Tartini who had music played to him in a dream, which he ended up calling the Devil’s Trill Sonata. While he recreated this sonata, he was haunted by the fact that what he came up with never matched the beauty of what he had heard in his dream. This is what gave me the idea for a story about a criminal haunted by a dream of a perfect heist that he is unable to remember.

Other writers have been more directly inspired by their dreams. Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after waking up from a nightmare of a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt the transformation scene that he used in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stephen King was inspired to write Misery after dreaming of a fan holding a writer captive. E. B. White was inspired to write Stuart Little after dreaming about a small boy who looked like a rat.

Hopefully I’ll have more dreams that will lead to more stories like A Lost Dream.