How a nightmare led to my book's antagonist

A number of years ago I was diagnosed with Nightmare Disorder. I don't have good dreams. Every night I am woken up multiple times by distressing, stressful dreams. Now, mine are not as bad as those that suffer from something like post-traumatic stress disorder, so don't feel too bad for me. You might classify at as mild relative to others. At this point, it has become so normal, that it sort of just washes over me. I wake up, heart racing, sometimes pillow wet with sweat. I flip the pillow over and go back to sleep. I've tried out some treatments, but nothing has really helped, so I have just push on with my life. 

When it first started though, I was not so used to it. It was having a very bad impact on my life. It was one of the reasons I went to the doctor to get diagnosed. After a few treatments failed, we came up with the idea that getting out of a specific employment situation might help as it was a source of considerable stress in my life. That didn't even help (though to be clear, this was not the only motivation for the job change). 

One particular dream I had just prior to the start of all the other nightmares was one that has had a profound impact on my life and in the end, turned out to be the key to getting my book written. I would rank it as the most vivid dream I have ever had and unforunately it was not a good one.

I dreamed that I was in our living room on the couch. The house was sparsely furnished: just a large empty room and the couch. It was positioned so I could look down the hallway to my home's front door.  It was one of those entryways that has the tall glass panel that runs parallel to the entire side of the door. It started pretty benign. It was night, and I was lounging back on the couch, just relaxing. Probably at the end of a hard day. I was completely alone, but that didn't seem to bother me, nor did the absence of all our other furniture and home decor. However, a growing dread began to come over me. Something was watching me. I sat up and looked around, but saw nothing at first. The dread began to turn into horror as I knew something was near. I looked at the darkened windows of the living room, but saw nothing. Then I turned to peer down the hallway and then I found it. Something was at my front door! I couldn't investigate. I was paralyzed. As I stared at the doorway, at first I could see nothing but darkness at the window, but then two red orbs appeared. They were glowing with a malevolent light and they bounced a little. They were absolutely unnerving. Soon that pair of red orbs were joined by more pairs until the entire window was nearly full of glowing red orbs jostling about. I realized then that they were eyes! I sensed the most pure evil I have ever felt. I knew the eyes belonged to invisble beings that wanted to do me harm. I don't recall if there were any sounds or anyone trying to the door knob, but their mere presence was enough to strike fear into the deepest recesses of my mind. As I began to fear that whatever beings these eyes belonged to would break through and destroy me, I noticed that they were just watching and waiting. A thought came to me then, though I am not sure how I knew it, that my door was some sort of barrier between me and these beings. They couldn't open the door. It was my decision on whether to let them in by whether I would choose to open the door or not. At that point, I must have awoken, because that was my last memory of the events of that dream.

That nightmare plagued me for quite some time. The terror I felt, the evil presence that I sensed, they just stayed with me. I reflected on it again and again. Even to this day, years later I can recall those feelings, the way the eyes watched me, and the strange knowledge that I knew that there was barrier between us and that I had a choice on whether to let evil in.

Over the years as I was pondering writing a book, these red eyes showed up again and again in my imagination as a potential plot point. I once thought about actually writing a science fiction book about them in the life of some man that was a little like me. Maybe I still will someday. But as I mentioned in the last post, I started thinking about my book's plot and realized that I needed an antagonist. Then it hit me. I already had one, or rather a lot of them. What is more menacing than being watched by red eyes in the dark that are nothing but pure evil and want to destroy your soul? I thought that would be a great thing to torment my characters with, but then I wondered, why are they there in the first place? And why these characters? As I considered these questions, I thought more and more about nightmares. I asked myself, "What if nightmares could escape their dream world and enter the waking world?" And then I had it. A nightmare that hated the fact that there were living, waking people of the world walking free, while it was trapped in the dream world behind that barrier, that it would stop at nothing to find a way to break down that barrier. And thus was born the Nightmare King who would send his subjects to tear at the barriers between their Nightmare World and the Waking World, trying to escape its boundaries. And he selected specific individuals who were most likely to allow him in. And thus was born my book series! 

Where did my idea for a novel originate?

Like my dad, I have loved stories for nearly my entire life. I've liked reading them and telling them. I've had some pretty interesting life experiences (at least to me) that I love to relate. Here are a few examples of stories I like to tell. I fell out of a second story window when I was a little kid, a few years later a car door flew open while my dad was driving and I slid out of the car and the only thing saving me from being run over was that my foot got caught in a seat belt. As a young adult, I hiked in knee deep snow in the mountains with shoes that were missing the toes and wearing shorts. I was almost in a plane crash as an adult (plane came within a foot or two of the ground before reascending).

In particular, I love stories that are character driven. TV shows, movies, and books need to have compelling characters or I get bored. I have given up on so many movies and TV shows that had great action, but the characters felt lifeless. I've absolutely loved movies that just feature character arcs with very little else going on. My favorite movie is Gattaca. It has a little bit of action going on (oooh, it's a murder mystery!), but that only serves to show some tension in the emotional progression of the protagonists. Field of Dreams is another. It has some fun stuff going on (the whole building a baseball field and taking road trips), but that is all secondary to the emotional journey of Kevin Costner's character. For a while Lost was my favorite TV show (before it went off the rails in the final season). It is a huge ensemble cast and a lot of crazy stuff happens, but for the most part it is all about how each of the characters grow (or regress) across the series. For books, I love the work of David Eddings. His two major series also have an ensemble cast and they go from one adventure to another, but for the most part the story is really about the growth and maturation of the boy, Garion, and the other characters and events all serve to teach him new lessons about himself. The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is the same way. It shows how all of the characters change due to the circumstances of life they are placed in.

I have had trouble sleeping for much of my life (more on that in another post as that plays a major role in the development of my book). One of the ways I have helped myself fall asleep from my earliest memories is to lie there in bed and tell myself a story, almost always with myself as the main character. Because it is my own story, I can really do whatever I want and I have always borrowed heavily from media, bringing in characters that I like. I will admit, most of those stories are absolute trash plot lines, but if I make them too complex then my mind gets going and I can't fall asleep, so in the end, dull stories help me fall asleep better.

That being the case, there is one story I have been telling myself for years that is much more complex. For who knows what reason, a good chunk of my self-told stories involve boats out on the sea, usually large galleon-type ships from the 16-1700s. Maybe imagining a wooden boat, with a gentle creaking of wood and rocking in the waves is soothing? But slowly a new story began to emerge from these large ship stories. I would imagine a crew of sailors setting off from a larger ship towards some mysterious island where adventure awaited. There was nervous tension in the boat as they did not know what to expect. Then I would imagine a woman, glowing so brightly you could barely see who she was) walking on the water toward the boat and scaring these sailors to death. I would often fall asleep before I figured out what to do about their next interaction. But bit by bit, when I really had trouble sleeping, I would get to the part where she would reach the boat, and she would be angry with them. She was some sort of guardian of the island and did not want them there and she would absolutely obliterate the boat; except she would save one person for reasons unknown and that man would be the protagonist of the story going forward. I never really made it past that part before I fell asleep.

Over time, I started to realize that this was a reoccurring story I was telling myself, without really thinking about it. So, I soon started to think about it during the day, often during a quiet time of daydreaming. I would ask myself who the woman was and why she was so upset with these sailors? What was it about the man that she saved that he deserved to be rescued? Why would she do it? What would happen to him next?

Another reoccurring story I had told myself while falling asleep for ages (I cannot recall when I first had this story come up) was some variation of a couple of peasant-like village kids that had these really normal lives, but the girl was special in some way. She was confident and talented, everything the boy was not. They were thrust into some adventure together and she came to care about him. He would have all these trials and travails, and she would come and rescue him with some sort of magical powers. It was a cute story, and probably one that I used to think about some sort of crush I had on a girl when I was little. I always kept it PG though ;).

Anyway, at some pointed I started to wonder if I could connect these two stories. What if the village kids and the sailor and the shining woman were all part of the same world? The moment I had that thought, an adventure story started tumbling out of me, but only in my mind. But I struggled with what events would happen to them. I started to think about who these characters were and what motivated them. I thought about how I wanted them to grow as people. I struggle with anxiety, so I wanted the boy to do so too, but he pushes through that anxiety to do great things despite it all. I wanted the girl to be aloof and a little arrogant but slowly soften and begin to care about others. I wanted the sailor to be selfish and bitter but learns to care about others and put the needs of others above that of his own. I wanted them all to feel displaced in the wider world, lost and confused, but come to a sense of acceptance to their new lives. 

So, like all those movies, TV shows, and books I read, I knew who my characters were and who I needed them to become. All that I needed next was what to do after the shipwreck (in the case of the sailor) and after leaving their village (for the kids). Bit by bit, in my mind I found experiences that would force them to grow. But I needed something to bring it all together. I needed an antagonist to these protagonists. I couldn’t really come up with a good one. And then something happened to me that revealed just who (or what) that antagonist would be. Stay tuned for my next post for what that experience was and how it led to the creation of this antagonist.

My Scientific Career Arc

I decided to major in neuroscience during my undergraduate university education. At the time, I didn't really know what it was, but it sounded really cool, and it honestly just felt like the "right" thing to do. Once I got into it, I found that I really liked it. Walking across campus one glorious spring day, I very randomly ran into a friend from high school I hadn't seen in four years. He told me that he was working in this neuroscience research laboratory and I should stop by and check it out as the professor was always looking for good undergraduate research volunteers. I followed my old friend's advice and soon enough I was working in a neuroscience research laboratory! 

What many people likely do not understand about US biomedical research laboratories is that most do not necessarily study all aspects of a "disease," although public-facing statements will indicate that they do so. Most study a VERY specific component of a disease or disorder or even just basic biology that may generally contribute to diseases or disorders. So a lab that studies a psychological disorder like schizophrenia might look at a few proteins in one part of the brain that contribute to the disorder. They will say that they study schizophrenia, but they are actually much more narrowly focused on one aspect of it. These disorders and diseases are just so complex that it is nearly impossible to look at every facet of it. But many labs approaching the diseases/disorders from different angles start to make a more complete image of what is going on.

So the laboratory I worked in as an undergraduate had this very narrow focus on a general neuroscience process involving how a certain class of proteins helps the part of the brain cell that releases neurotransmitters (for example, dopamine or serotonin) interact with each other to help that release proceed. It was very basic and not really tied to any one specific disease and just studying a general brain cell process (for those who care, these are the proteins that tetanus toxin and Botox mess with, so please stay up to date on your tetanus vaccines and avoid Botox if you can). Honestly, it was not the most stimulating of research for someone who was interested in bigger neuroscience questions, but the professor I worked for was great, and I learned a lot about how to do science from him.

One day I attended a seminar that a visiting professor gave about drug addiction and how we need more research to help people who are suffering from it. I was inspired, especially since I had a family member die from a drug overdose, so it was personal. So, when it came time to apply to graduate school, I applied to a number of different programs with expertise in this area of neuroscience. Fortunately, I was accepted into a prestigious one, and I was very excited.

I won't take you through all the twists and turns of getting a PhD in neuroscience. Getting a PhD is not necessarily getting a degree in being smart (although that helps), but it is getting a degree in doing something very hard and requires a lot of dedication and perseverance through discouragement and frustration. Research is tough! I was able to join a dissertation laboratory where I researched how cannabis and cannabis-related drugs changed the way brain cells functioned. It was a lot of pharmacology, cellular biology, and physiology. In the end, I published seven scientific papers. 

This was my favorite one that I published as a graduate student. I had always wanted a paper in the journal Molecular Pharmacology and I was able to finally get one!

I then went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship, which is something most graduate students in the biomedical students do, sort of like a medical residency or a specialization training in other fields. You do a lot of the same things, but often at a higher level (you are more capable now after all). For my postdoc I switched drugs and studied opioids, again looking at how opioids changed brain cell function. I was able to get a really large paper in Nature Neuroscience, a pretty darn prestigious journal in the neuroscience field (near the top).

After the postdoc, I landed my dream job. I got a faculty position that let me start my own independent research laboratory where I could hire scientists, and I could decide what kinds of things to study. Of course, this carried an immense weight of having to find the money to pay for it all, which involved writing a lot of research grants. And I mean A LOT. But it was pretty rewarding. My laboratory further expanded its research portfolio and we started looking at drug consumption behavior of alcohol and opioids as well as what happens to the kids of moms that used opioids while they were pregnant. Here are three of my favorite papers from my laboratory.

Overall, I have "published" over 55 papers as a scientist with a lot of talks and other oral presentations all around the world too. Publishing in science is a little weird. You can look at the author lists of these papers I highlighted above and try and figure out who wrote what in the paper. Author lists are confusing, because not everyone on the list actually wrote anything. The first author listed in the biomedical field usually did most of the writing, while the last author signed off on all the writing and often did a lot of editorial work. They are also usually the one that paid for it all with their grant money. The middle authors sometimes wrote parts of it, sometimes ran some of the experiments, or sometimes were valuable consultants to the project. Across my 55 papers I have been all of those things: a writer, an editor, an experimenter, and a consultant. But I also review MANY papers and edit a lot of other people's work too. So I am well versed in writing and editing. Of those 55 papers, I wrote probably 95% of nine of the papers. A few were 50-50 with someone else. I supervised/had the final editing say on a lot of them. And others I wrote a few paragraphs in. A handful I just read over, and I offered my two cents on the content on the final product (but I helped the project along the way).

But the catch of all this is, my entire experience for the last 20-plus years has been scientific writing, which is a subclass of technical writing. It is generally very explanatory, didactic, and straight to the point with little fluff. It is very dry. There is also no character dialogue whatsoever in it. So when I decided to try out fiction writing, I had to adapt my writing style dramatically. And that was quite the process. More on that to come!

My First Books

 My father wasn't a fiction writer. He was a chemical engineer that worked in the plastics industry. But he was a storyteller. Some of my fondest early childhood memories were of the family sitting around our brick fireplace, snuggled in blankets on a cold winter day, listening to him tell us stories about a family that could use these magical spheres to travel to distant places and have adventures. They were pretty original at the time (this was the early 1980s) and I was fascinated by them. Other times he would tell each of me and my siblings bedtime stories as he tucked us into bed. So from an early age, my head was filled with stories. 

I am not sure whether or not I am weird, but for most of my life I have fallen asleep by telling myself a story, often involving me going on a magical journey. Some of these were original, but admittedly they often feature characters ripped from the pages and screens of pop culture. And I am okay with that. Those stories are for me as the only audience, and hey, I can do whatever I want if I'm the only one involved. I guess it is more like fanfiction, you could say. But the point I am making is that I have always been a storyteller in my head. 

When I was young, I wanted to put some of those stories to paper and have others read them, and I got that chance for the first time in third grade. When I was 9-years-old, my family moved from a small town in western North Carolina, USA to Newark, Delaware, USA, a college town on the outskirts of the much larger city of Wilmington, Delaware. I was pretty new to moving to a new place (I would eventually move A LOT in my life). So I had to navigate the process of getting used to a new location, making new friends, and getting the lay of the social landscape. And embarrassingly, I did the wrong read on my new classmates.

I don't remember exactly what it was called, but my class did some sort of lesson on microeconomics. My current children's schools call it something like "business town." We invented a flag and what our money would be called (I think it was called "clam bucks"). We were given the assignment to make products that we could sell at a business day in the near future.

I thought this was my chance to become an author and sell some books (for fake money, but to a third-grader this was good enough for me). I got stacks of paper and wrote and illustrated copy after copy of three different books. I don't remember what two of them were about. I think one was fantasy and the other one was horror (to a 9-year-old). But I know the third was called "The Lamborghini of Time." Looking back, I must have seen "Back to the Future" sometime around then, because it was a complete ripoff of that story, just replacing the Delorean with a Lamborghini because, hey, the doors open upwards the same. I was also very obsessed with Lamborghinis at the time, poster on the bedroom wall and all. But if felt original to me. 

On the business day, I proudly set up my stand at my desk in the classroom and arranged stacks of my three books. I looked around at my classmates' stands and saw very different products than mine. They all clearly knew something that I didn't. Someone was selling little airplanes made from a tube of Life Savers, sticks of gum (for wings), and Fruit Loop wheels. Another person had made toys out of a disc of painted wood with strings threaded through it that you could wind up the strings and pull on them, making the colorful discs spin. Someone else sold cookies. Everywhere I looked, I saw sweets and toys, and I realized that I had grossly miscalculated the third-grade market.

Everyone was given a certain amount of clam bucks to spend, and we took turns going around and buying from each other. My pride in my product quickly diminished as student after student would pass by my desk with an idle glance and then go and buy candy airplanes and wooden discs. I know that I bought one of the disc toys, as I kept it for many years. My teacher, taking pity on me, gave me some clam bucks for a book. 

Then the real kicker was that we had a prize day where someone had donated a ton of toys and games and other things to the class, and we got to use our accumulated wealth to bid on and purchase real life auctioned prizes. Naturally, the kid who made the toy discs and the airplane guy raked in the most rewards. My teacher slipped me some more clam bucks so that I could get a small LEGO set that I had my eye on, but had no chance of winning otherwise. I am forever grateful for that teacher's loving kindness for a student. 

In the end, the lesson I learned from that was that I was not a good fiction writer and books don't sell all that well. With hindsight, that was clearly not the right conclusion to make. It was that I didn't understand the market in a third-grade class that prized immediate gratification, and a poorly illustrated short story couldn't measure up to the books they had back home. But as one of those core memories that a child forms, I abandoned by plans to become a fiction author for my other love of science and exploration. I had a competing dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer one day, and I shifted my focus to more scientific pursuits.

A Strange Journey to a Long-delayed Dream

 When I was 9-years-old back in Newark, Delaware, USA, my third grade elementary school class had a "business day." All the kids made products to sell, and then we sold our products to each other using fake money. At the time, I had a dream of becoming a fiction writer one day, and so I wrote three "books" and made many copies of each them. I use the term "books" loosely as they were more like pamphlets. But anyway. Unfortunately, my classmates made toys and cookies and candies. I think my teacher was the only one who bought one of my books, mostly out of pity. I remember being crushed and thought that books must not be a valuable commodity. In retrospect, I just didn't know my target market: third-graders love toys and sweets. But the damage was done. I was out of the fiction business.

Life went on. I grew up and went off to university and majored in neuroscience (more familiarly known as brain science). I worked in a research laboratory during my undergraduate years, and fell in love with biomedical research. A new dream blossomed: running my own neuroscience research laboratory one day. There are so many exciting things to study in neuroscience, but I was especially interested in what addictive drugs do to the brain, so I got a PhD in neurobiology (again, another word for brain science) studying what cannabis/marijuana-like drugs do to brain cells. I continued to follow that career arc, going on to do a postdoctoral fellowship studying opioid effects on the brain. My (new) dream then came true. I was offered a faculty position at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA and got to lead my very own research laboratory studying how opioids and alcohol change the way the brain works. I worked there for over eight years, but decided that I needed a change of scenery, so I transferred to the University of Minnesota Medical School, pretty much doing the same things, just somewhere else.

By most objective measures, I've been a very successful scientist. I've published over 50 scientific papers, been awarded many research grants from the National Institutes of Health, trained and mentored many brilliant young scientists, taught a few courses, and made a few discoveries that I think are pretty exciting. But I've always had this nagging question in the back of my mind: what if you had become a novelist instead, like your nine-year-old self wanted to be? I mean, I am a published author many times over. But that's technical writing. It is storytelling of a sort, but it can be very dry and frankly dull at times. Despite not having written anything fictional in decades, I still had these stories running through my head. What if I could make that nine-year-old me's dream come true? So I did.

This is the blog of my journey. What story did my nine-year-old self write? What did I do with my neuroscience career? Did it matter? Where did the idea for a novel come from? Why didn't I do it sooner? What were the challenges shifting from technical writing to fiction writing? What are the obstacles I did not expect to find, and what did I do about them? And what is this novel even about (and is it any good)?

Stay tuned as I take you on this journey with me.