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!
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