Nightmares
How They Can Make Good Stories
I had a nightmare the other day.
Thursday morning at 4.36am I finally fell asleep after having woken up at 2am, unable to fall back to sleep. I spent the next approximate 2.5 hours reading - nothing scary or intense. However, upon falling asleep I was yanked into a nightmare more intense than I had ever experienced before. Not that I’ve experienced a great deal of nightmares - usually I don’t even dream.
It started with a false awakening in my bed where I quickly realized that my movement was restricted. I was not tied down, rather my body was heavy with some drug and I could barely move. Once I managed to open my eyes, I saw my mother through my clouded vision. She was asking me what’s wrong, but something was off. First of all, my mother doesn’t live with me. Second, she is currently much older than the version standing at the foot of my bed. Third, there was something… off, something other about her. Once it sunk in that this creature was not my mother, the panic started to roll in. Cue themes of trying to move and speak and not being able to, trying to escape the demon that stole my mother’s image by putting in so much effort to get away only to have it appear effortlessly in front of me, and having no control whatsoever over my surroundings (at one point my living room turned into Christmas - I don’t even know how I would begin to explain that, plus the memory has faded a bit).
I have never woken up with terror in my body like I did when the nightmare finally released me and I moved out of that REM cycle. I tried to think about what might have caused it but my mind was blank. The only thing that was different about that night was the fact that I woke up in the middle of it and read for a few hours (but again, nothing scary or intense) and that when I went back to sleep after reading, I was on my left side instead of my right. Neither of those seem likely as the cause, though. I spent the next two hours writing down what happened (although the Christmas part I still could not articulate). It shouldn’t have taken two hours for me to write down the nightmare (it ended up only being 5 short pages - 2.5 front and back, technically) but I was exhausted and a little freaked out. But after I finished writing it down, my mind started to think about ways that I could incorporate this into a short story or horror novel. And boy, did I come with so many ideas! There were so many different ways I could write a story like that, it was all I was thinking about during the day - and the reason I didn’t get too much done at my bill-paying job that day. Even though my subconscious was a little fucked up then, it gave me material to draw on for future stories. While my main focus will remain on my current WIP, I will be referencing that little dream journal entry in the future.
You really can get inspiration from anything.