I don't dream. I fall asleep and daydream a little while I wait to really sleep and then the next day I wake up. Some nights I have dreams, I must, but as soon as I awaken I feel it flutter out of my head and thus it is lost. When I was little I had night terrors, the worse version of nightmares, and as such I believe I have developed some sort of defense system by forgetting every dream I have, if I do have them, so as to never know if I have a bad one. Of course this raises the question of when do bad dreams go away in life? Do dreams get less scary as we get older and our imaginations die off or do we simply get tougher and shake them off easier? I can't answer that one because I sometimes suffer delusions and delirium, especially when sick, and so all dreams become absolutely terrifying because the world turns into one and I pace between bathroom and bedroom for an hour and stare at a light until I sleep with it right in my face. Maybe this is where the horror of my books come from, though this one isn't nearly as evil or terrifying as another less mentionable one I made, at least to me.

So of course, with all this in mind, you can imagine my surprise when I had one of my rare dreams I actually remembered, one in which I woke up and it stuck with me for days on end. It was a dream about myself in some sort of dead world, where zombies of intelligence roamed and tried to get me and I, weaponless but resourceful, could always teleport with my handy teleporter whenever it got dangerous. Eventually I somehow ended up in a dark tunnel, maybe a subway, where I was safe from the zombies but was attacked by other things instead. Of course this happens to be the basic plot structure of Black Pueblo because I could not pass up such a rare and bizarre dream. Upon analysis I realize that most any dream I remember features me in an unkillable sort of state, where I can instanntly rewind time, or get another life, or turn invisible, whenever danger surfaces. Does this mean something? I'm not sure but I happen to also find that my written works almost always deal with the mind and thought, and with death, and sometimes understanding life through it, but mostly trying to understand death. Does that mean I need a psychologist to psychoanalyze my dreams and works and thoughts or is it just coincidence? Who knows.

Black Pueblo though must thus hold a special place in my head as a dream I finally had and one that is fully immortalized. Obviously there are a lot of things in the book that never came close to my dream but I had to do something to make it work as a book and to add more suspense than my infinite ability to retry. This one fell into my traditional style of writing where I create a base idea and a start, thinking about the set up and the base and then I come up with an ending, and I get excited and I must figure out a way to get from my happy start to my happy ending, in which I just start writing and talking to myself when I'm not. I was lucky when I was writing this one as there was a park I lived at and needed to walk through everyday to get anywhere, a place where as I walk I talk to myself, out loud or in my head, and come up with something to do. The twists in the book surprise me too as I go along and I'm amazed to see that I have somehow connected something in the past with what just happened, almost always without ever thinking about it. Perhaps the whole thing is a dream in my mind that has worked itself out and I can watch along and go with it, sometimes finding a way to gain temporary control, other times reading it again and not knowing what I just put in. Maybe I do need to see a psychologist to explain what happens or maybe I will just keep exploring it in my writing until one of my characters suffers a break-through or a breakdown and I come away understanding myself. A selfish way to write but at least I put it out there for people to read.