Kind of glad to see the nightmares back, and how a Ramsey Campbell story led to my first "inspired" Nightmare since Cannibal Holocaust

BLOT: (17 Oct 2011 - 06:14:36 PM)

Kind of glad to see the nightmares back, and how a Ramsey Campbell story led to my first "inspired" Nightmare since Cannibal Holocaust

I suffer a surplus of nightmares, though rarely do I get the usual accompaniment of night terror or feelings of being utterly helpless in way that makes me breathless or freaked out. On a psychological level, it seems an obvious response to the large quantities of horror fiction and movies I devour on pretty much a daily basis. On a more neuroscience level, bad/disturbing dreams has been linked to lighter sleepers, and while I am not as light a sleeper as I once was, I still find myself rousing a few times a night. White noise generators, aka electric fans, help, because without one I'll only sleep about half an hour at a go before being woken up by some sound gone before I was conscious enough to acknowledge it.

For a couple of weeks, though, I have not had nightmares, I have had these long, slow dreams about going off to college: preparing for school, newly showing up at school, worrying about the the future of school, or moving to a new place. In a recent one, I was living in a hollowed up old school bus [surely this is a reference to Pollock's Knockemstiff] and walking around old dirt roads and old trails of my youth, and effectively saying goodbye to everything. Some of my family understood, some did not. It took forever. Sarah was somehow involved, almost like a very close friend I was going to miss, and it seemed that she stayed with my parents but was effectively acknowledged as a love-interest of mine.

Luckily, though, last night's sleep time was not a long lugubrious bromide to my late teenage years and instead was a good, short, intense nightmare. A family, of which I was part but it was not my actual family, was tending crops when a rain started up and then the [my] dad runs past me, rifle in hand, and before I can finish whatever it was I was doing, the [my] younger sister pulls up another gun and starts screaming. I look around and there is Dad being confronted by a thing outlined mostly in the rain and the blowing dust, an absence or lull in the rough shape of a man, sort of a shadow cast on reality itself. After my sister's shots, it pops and reality fills back in the hole it but immediately we get the feel that it is coming right back, and Dad runs over and we high tail it for a small little house we lived in, and then start barricading the doors. Then we can see something moving around outside, beyond the glass, but the conditions make it hard to focus on. The dream ended with it coming around to the backdoor, a blur in the fogged up glass, and me unable to lock the door itself and trying to drag a heavy chair, one almost too heavy to move, so that I could block it up and, in that dream way, unable to really get a proper grip unless I made too much noise and gave away our location for sure.

The dream was almost definitely inspired by reading Ramsey Campbell's "Napier Court" directly before I went to bed. In it, a 21-year-old mostly shut off from the real world sort gets the impression she keeps seeing something move on the dark landing outside of the glass of her bedroom door, and in one part there is this bit: "In the hall—what had been wrong? She caught it: as she'd mounted the stairs she'd seen a shape in the hall mirror. Maureen's coat hanging on the coat stand—but Maureen wasn't here. Certainly something pale had stood against the front-door panes." Good little creepy things.

This makes it the first time since I had a nightmare inspired by Cannibal Holocaust that one of my nightly fear trips has been directly linked to something I have done. Just thought I'd share.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011