Storytellersunplugged

I’m pretty sure that my affinity for writing horror comes largely from the fact that, for as long as I can remember, I have had chronic, hellishly bad dreams. They’re usually in 70mm Cinemascope and Technicolor, with THX sound, and some of them have lingered through the years more vividly than any waking experience. In fact, as near as I can tell, my earliest living memory is of a nightmare. Yep, and I can tell you that the sheer power of these intimate, emotionally charged experiences is what most often compels me to write scary shit. I suspect that this is not uncommon among those of us who frequent this joint; so I hope you’ll forgive me if I share few of my most significant memories from beyond the wall of sleep.

I don’t know exactly how old I was, probably around two, but I distinctly recall being in bed with a tall railing, which required careful scaling in order to escape. (Hey — shut off those searchlights, willya?) I woke from a sound sleep, or so I thought, only to find myself mesmerized by the low, rhythmic beating of my heart. I then heard something thumping in counterpoint, coming from the basement stairs that led up to the kitchen. Too young to know anything about curiosity killing cats, I scaled the rails, made my way to the kitchen, and found the basement door gaping open. And bouncing up the stairs was a tall, armless thing with a stitched, football-shaped head and a single eye glaring malevolently at me. I screamed and woke up — actually sitting in the kitchen at the top of the basement stairs. My parents came running to see what the squalling was all about, and to this day, my mother recalls that incident as being particularly unnerving because I was so adamant about what I had seen.

Then, in college, around 1980, I got that famous feeling of someone walking over my grave: in art history class, I again encountered the very thing I had seen on the stairs all those years ago. In a painting by Giorgio di Chirico.

Here is an image of the painting what done it:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v665/damnedrodan/chirico.jpg

Okay, I guess I can safely assume that, at that young, impressionable age, I had seen a copy of the painting and then had a nightmare about it. Either that, or we had some mighty messed-up-looking trespassers back in those days.

This was far from the last terrifying dream I had as a young’un, but it was quite seminal, I believe, in my psychological development. Even today, I expect I find de Chirico’s paintings somewhat more disturbing than does the casual viewer.

When I was 11 or 12, I experienced the worst night-horror of my entire life — the most nerve-shattering portions of which eventually made their way into my story “Fugue Devil” (1991). The dream featured a rather hellish varmint, which struck me as an amalgamation of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the She-Creature, and the demon from CURSE OF THE DEMON. (So I watched a lot of horror movies back then; big deal.) The nightmare unfolded with the clarity of an actual waking event, and I’m sure there’s a deep crease in my brain that stores every wondrously awful second of it.

The dream opens with a black, unidentifiable shape sailing across a late afternoon sky, zig-zagging from horizon to horizon, trailing black smoke. Naturally, it isn’t long before the demon appears to me in my backyard, and what should happen but I wake up in a cold sweat - the first and only time I’ve ever experienced such a thing. When I finally manage to get back to sleep, the dream takes up right where it left off — and soon the creature shows up in front of both my younger brother and me. Again, I wake up, even more frightened than before, and now I find myself actually short of breath — an honest-to-God panic attack. Eventually, though, I do go back to sleep, and again the dream continues. I’ve taken refuge at my best friend’s house, but the thing finds me even there; it gets into the house and, this time, it reaches out to get me. Now people, this thing has great big tuskies sticking out of its mouth, and huge claws on the end of its feet.

That’s when I woke up, and that was all she wrote for sleep for the rest of that night.

A few years later, in college, I frequently had dreams of large, mindless but malevolent crowds of people chasing me (which might have had something to do with the frat parties I crashed, but that’s another story). In one of the most noteworthy, I was driving my car through a small town, with my good friend Doug Craft in the passenger seat. Mobs of people were milling about purposelessly, and after a while, we saw a body fall from some height and splat on the pavement very near my car. Looking up, I realized that a number of people were queued up on the roof of a nearby building, and one at a time, they were hurling themselves to their deaths. We got out of the car, and suddenly, some of the roving rabble grabbed Doug and pulled him away from me. Duty, of course, impelled me to go searching for him, but what I eventually stumbled upon was a circle of undead-looking people passing around a bucket of nasty goop, from which each would take a hefty gulp. They passed it to me, and that’s when I woke up, mercifully spared from drinking any chuck, nice and scared and thoroughly sleep deprived by sunup the next morning.

That’s just a small sampling from a huge catalog; I remember countless more examples just as vividly. In college, I took a seminar on dream analysis, and it was interesting in that its stated purpose was to help you deal with waking issues by teaching you to exert control over your subconscious mind. I can’t say I mastered the control part very well, but the course did involve writing down dreams, so, for that period of time, I have a detailed record of my nightly sojourns. A clear majority of them were frightening.

As I’ve grown older, somewhat to my chagrin, my dreams have tended to be less dramatic. I’ve always believed that dreams largely reflect issues in one’s waking life, and as one works through them, the dreams adjust themselves accordingly. While there are some day-to-day conflicts from my younger years I’d just as soon not suffer through again, I have to confess I miss the challenges those old nightmares presented to my sleeping self. And there are certain aspects of the present I would happily trade for issues that seemed insurmountable during my naïve adolescence. However, I still occasionally have nighttime adventures that give me right much of a charge, even when, at the time, they seem outlandish, upsetting, or downright terrifying.

Whatever the reasons for them, I relish my most dramatic nightmares. Deprived of them, I imagine I would lose my most passionate creative drive.

A line penned by a newspaper reporter in 1974 sums it up pretty well, I think. Because I had written an article for THE MONSTER TIMES (remember that one?) and started up a fanzine (JAPANESE GIANTS) when I was 15, the local paper did a feature about me, which the Associated Press subsequently picked up. During the interview, I talked a little about my affinity for nightmares, which — somewhat to my glee — left the reporter scratching her head in disbelief. The article ended with, “Mark Rainey’s idea of Heaven is apparently a place populated by creatures that, to the rest of us, surely belong in Hell.”

I reckon I couldn’t have said it better.

–Mark Rainey