2/18/24
There Are Places I Remember…
This is number fifty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“I’VE VISITED a lot of places I’ve never been.” That’s kind of a typical statement for an avid reader. Every book takes them someplace they’ve never been. They store up vivid memories of exotic locations, alien planets, fantasy jungles—all from the books they read.
It’s a little different than that for me. Yes, there are places I read about that became very real to me. But I dream.
My dreams are often so vivid that when I remember them later, I assume they were real and not dreams at all. I remember holding Pam W. in my arms in high school. I pressed her to me and felt her breath on my cheek. I spent a week thinking I was dating Pam W. and waiting to hold hands with her as we walked out of school. As if Pam W. would ever even say hello to me!
Last night I woke up at 3:30 a.m. during a dream. I’d entered a rather bizarre theatre. The stage was a proscenium—just a hole cut in a wall with a platform behind it to perform on. The seats were gym bleachers that went up six or eight rows and started about twenty feet back from the stage. But they weren’t just in front of the stage. They extended a hundred feet left and right of the stage, just facing a bare wall.
I was trying to find a seat where I could at least partially see the stage when I saw two women come into the theatre. I recognized them as the new owners of a favorite RV park where I intended to camp. That led to the realization that I hadn’t made a reservation. I rushed to the women to ask if they could still get me in and we were discussing whether that would require a $50 deposit… When I woke up.
I lay in bed, smiling, thinking I really needed to stop at that RV park again soon. Then I started asking myself where it was, because I needed to plan my next trip. I racked my brain to remember where exactly that park was located. I retraced my trips over the past ten years and could not remember where it was! It had the feeling of California, but I could remember nearly all the major places I’d camped in California. It wasn’t there. I continued to go state-by-state through all the routes I’d taken and places I’d camped.
Three hours later, I got out of bed, finally convinced that there was no such RV park or highway and city. Sometime in the past ten years or so, while traveling with my truck and trailer, I’d dreamed that location and it was so complete and vivid, I thought I’d been there. Now, I don’t think it exists at all!
Vividly realistic dreams are not a unique occurrence for me. Many years ago, I dreamed that I’d injured my knee. It didn’t hurt when I woke up, but I carried with me the conviction that I had bad knees. I considered running at one time, but simply shook my head and said “My knees won’t let me do that!” It wasn’t until I went to a trainer to lose some weight and he questioned me about what I’d done to ruin my knees that I realized I couldn’t think of having done anything that ruined them. That day, I started running and had no problem with my knees at all!
My dreams have influenced my writing many times. When I was still a child (sometime between 10 and 14), I had a dream that was repeated periodically with exactly the same scenario, so realistic to me that despite its impossibilities, it had the power of being a memory. Twenty years later, when I had the dream again, I incorporated it into the first novel I wrote, Behind the Ivory Veil.
In my dream, I was disturbed from my sleep in my attic bedroom and looked out the vent window to see neighbors and strangers alike, lighting bonfires and setting everything they could find ablaze. I rushed downstairs and out to find out what was wrong and was told it was a sign from God that it was the end of the world and they were lighting the hellfire. They pointed up and I saw dozens of moons crossing the sky. They were in all phases: new, quarter, waning, waxing, full.
I had a new Bible and had been studying faithfully. I attempted to convince the people that this wasn’t a sign of the end, but was a fulfillment of the scripture that said “Many moons shall come and go, but my Word lives on.” Let’s ignore the blatant misquoting of scripture as well as the ridiculousness of the moons in the sky.
Suffice it to say that this prophet was not received in his own country and was pursued by the fanatics. I had a sure sense of direction at that age. East was history: Washington, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, and even Europe. South was the backwoods and hillbillies. I’d been to the Ozarks and to Kentucky. West was the City, not just the comparably small city I was used to, but Chicago. The real city. But North was a sacred direction. I knew that in the North was safety. I fled to the North to escape to the Northern Steppes, which I interpreted as literal steps that I had to climb. They led to the temple of Aurora Borealis, the Northern Light. There, the three sacred sisters, Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy, would follow me all the days of my life and I would dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Imagine how vivid and real that repeating dream was that I can recount it so accurately sixty years later. And ultimately, that dream became the basis of Wesley’s captivity in Behind the Ivory Veil. Perhaps it has become as real to readers as it was to me.
Behind the Ivory Veil is available as The Props Master Prequel on Bookapy.com.
The point—there is a point to this—is that the reason places become real to people in stories… the reason Narnia and Middle Earth and Metropolis and the Matrix and Olympus and Valhalla and Barsoom and Calahan’s Place are so memorably real, is because those places were real to the authors. That erotic scene in which Brian can feel the breath of his girlfriend on his cheek just before they kiss is real because it was real to me in my dream. The Temple of Aurora Borealis is real to Wesley because it was so vividly real to me in my adolescent dreams.
And who knows? In a future story somewhere along the line, there is an RV park waiting that is as real to me as any of the parks I’ve stayed in over the past ten years. If I do it right, it will be real to you, as well.
I’ve mentioned my editors in this and other blog posts. I think next week it will be time to take a first look at what an editor is and how to use one. We’ll call this one, “All hail the editor!”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
