Today is Halloween, when even the most horror-averse of us are thinking about all things spooky. And for many people, today is the perfect day to revisit the work of the American master of horror, Stephen King. King, author of 83 novels and over 200 short stories, has often claimed that some of his best ideas have come to him in his sleep. Michael Conrad, author of the new graphic novel “Tremor Dose,” has been interested in this statement, and has tried to apply this same technique to his writing.
To celebrate both the most ghoulish day of the year, as well as the release of “Tremor Dose,” Conrad wrote about King, ideas gleaned from dreams, and the intersection of inspiration and hard work, in an essay he’s calling “No Free Lunch In The Land Of Nod: A Brief Discourse On Dreams and the King of Horror.”
Take it away, Michael.
Written by Michael ConradCover by Noah Bailey
Illustrated by Noah BaileyEveryone dreams, but are these dreams our own? Who controls our thoughts when we’re sleeping? Ginn, is a young college student who has been having wildly disturbing nightmares featuring a man she has never met. When she finds a flyer with his picture and the question, “Have you dreamed this man?” she submits to an interview that begins to unravel her perceptions of reality.
Part of the comiXology Originals line of exclusive digital content only available on comiXology and Kindle. This title is available as part of comiXology Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited and Prime Reading.
“No-one’s interested in anyone else’s dreams, They say. Show Them this. See them eat their words. Astoundingly rendered by Bailey, sharply constructed by Conrad, this is intimate like the inside of your eyelids and creepy as opening them and finding your eyes are gone.”
– Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + The Divine, DIE)“Creepy and gorgeous! A story you’ll keep revisiting as you admire its complexities!”
– Chip Zdarsky (Spider-Man: Life Story, Sex Criminals) –“All at once alluring and uncanny, Tremor Dose juxtaposes the familiar and the foreign in a fever-dream of a comic that will leave you in a cold sweat, gasping for more.”
– Becky Cloonan (By Chance or Providence, Gotham Academy)
There’s this notion that writers have the most fantastical dreams and through them are granted access to ideas that mere mortals simply cannot imagine. For me, the notable template for this idea takes the form of one of my heroes, master of the macabre, Stephen King.
I don’t know where I got the idea, but it seems to have been one that is shared by many, as I have heard it echoed in lament by fellow writers for years. Why should anyone get free stories? One minute you’re crawling into bed after a long day of doing whatever it is normal people do, the next you wake up ready to write The Stand?
Well, I for one don’t get free ideas while I sleep, I get the mundane, unusable ones. I get the ones that Mitch Hedberg made jokes about, the ones where I’m inexplicably making a go-kart with my ex-landlord. On the odd occasion that I do have what feels like something I can harvest and bring to the table it’s always the same. This stroke of brilliance in the small hours, scrawled hastily before making attempts to get plugged back into that dream zeitgeist, reads like the back of a cereal box in the morning. Usually something half-cocked and flaccid, something that requires that fog of semi consciousness to even feel slightly interesting. Maybe there was more to it and the memory of the dream has faded (as they are wont to do), but I’m typically left with the notion that the idea was never much to begin with.
That’s the magic of it though, right? When we dream, we don’t have the usual governor on our neural activity. The self-conscious awareness of the derivative sameness of our thoughts has gone away for 8 hours if we are among the lucky few afforded such slumber. In this can certainly be a couple surreal nuggets, but what are we to do with them?
Continued belowThis may be the key to the “Stephen King gets his ideas from dreams” thing. Mr. King has the kind of mind that can pull ideas that others would dismiss and spin them into incredible elements of his stories. King didn’t wake up with The Shining ready to rip, but instead found elemental bits and pieces in his nocturnal journeys and injected them into the narrative as only he can do. After a late season stay at the Stanley Hotel, legend has it that the idea for The Shining had started to take form and that night King dreamed of his son Joe (Hill, another dream warrior) being chased down through the hotel by a firehose. See what I mean? A lesser storyteller would pitch such an idea in the bin, Stephen King turned it into a book that has sold nearly 400 million copies…and someone made a movie out of it, too.
So what is a writer to do with this information? Well, one could take notes of all those outlandish things that happen in dreams and try to shoehorn them into stories, what could go wrong? Or we can accept that there is no magical fount of stories, and remember that absolutely everything we encounter is fodder for what we do. Dreams are just another thing that we must pay attention to if we are going to tap into something fresh.
My partner is an artist and a very busy one at that. We both work from the home studio and I will typically spend the better part of the day bothering her while I gear up to do some typing. I’m lucky if I can get a few hours of good work in, all this while she toils endlessly in a way that makes me feel like a layabout. I get hard on myself and tell myself to get back at it, if not for my own work than to stay out of her hair long enough to allow her to get into the zone.
What I have failed to account for is all the time I spend in my head. A simple trip to the coffee shop is never just that; there is always something simmering away and I’m always looking for that missing piece. Telling stories often feels like a really emotional Sudoku; you know that something is going to fit in there just right, but sometimes the fear of throwing off the rest of the puzzle will keep you at a standstill. Suddenly when the barista calls your order, the fix might hit you in the back of the head like a clawhammer and BINGO, we have found the number. Once the shape of the piece has been determined, it’s usually a snap to get it in there, but that’s a lot of time spent searching, even when you’re just trying to get your daily ration of caffeine.
So maybe it’s easier just to say, “I got it from a dream.” This seems to be a popular way to avoid the grossly oblique and overused go-to lilliputian question writers love so much, “Where do your ideas come from?” The good answer here is “dreams” because at least that shuts down that ridiculous line of questioning and moves us along to something more juicy, or at the very least a question that has an answer that won’t take a lifetime of context clues to even brush up against.
Everyone is different, and as such I’m not saying that there aren’t writers who wake up with a full story ready to go, courtesy of Mr. Sandman. If they exist, I certainly envy them! If sleeping was the trick I would welcome the cognitive space it would open up for me during my waking hours! I would love to get served up some good stuff during slumber and be more present when I’m out with friends, binge watching the new incredible show, or trying to fall asleep…but it just plain isn’t my truth. I can only aspire to a level of craftsmanship that allows me to apply elements of these nightly flights of not-so-fancy in a way that stirs the same responses of disquiet that only a good nightmare can.
Continued belowStephen King has offered a number of great places where he has mined gold, dreams being one of many, and frankly his sound more productive than most. King has done something far more critical than pull dreams onto the page: he has willfully allowed a dreamstate to become entwined with his work. He has allowed his hopes, anxieties, and absolute terror a place to grow. Maybe it’s the elbow room afforded by success, but more likely it is this philosophy that begat the quality.
“Tremor Dose” by Michael Conrad and Noah Bailey is available now.
