The Escape
As a child, I developed an irrational—though perhaps understandable—fear of the dark. I suffered from night terrors the likes of which I would not wish upon any other living soul. My mother would regularly find me, wide-eyed and scrambling desperately about the house on all fours. I was inconsolable, for in these distorted battles between life and death—within these recurring nightmares—I was being hunted. The outcome was always the same, it would end with me being decapitated and—not snapping thankfully awake, but—watching as the grass beneath my cataleptic fingers soaked red with blood.
I believe that these horrendous visions, which haunted my sleep after the house fire, forced my young mind to search for avenues of escape. In this way, it triggered my rapid descent into (and perhaps beyond what we understand as) Lucid Dreaming.
This is where it is my turn to confess: that Steggie Belle & the Dream Warriors, as wildly fantastical as it might seem, is partly autobiographical, and partly based on truth. Like the novel’s narrator, Zoofall, I have chosen secrecy: not to go into exact details as to what extent the story is based upon my past. I feel that those who know me personally, will have a fairly good idea.
I will, however, as a genuine thank you for your ongoing interest and support, admit one thing. That Zoofall’s description, early on in the book, of how he used to dream as a young child, is absolutely true. Like with him, to me, this was the most natural thing in the world and something which I never questioned as being unusual at the time. Pausing dreams was a skill that I assumed to be totally normal and did result—as you may imagine—in me forming stronger connections to the dream world than within the waking.
As mentioned briefly in my author bio, the process of Lucid Dreaming has been something which I have benefited greatly from, at different stages of my life so far. During my teenage years it was incredibly helpful when it came to studying and revising for tests or exams: either by replaying various lessons from that day or by reopening and rereading particular books and texts within the dream itself. When I began writing poetry, I would sometimes focus entire dreams on rewording, revising, and even creating poems from scratch. Recently, from time to time, I have used these same techniques to continue working on both my short stories and Steggie Belle itself. Only last month—on a far duller and mundane note—I spent ten minutes before going to bed carefully studying all the various parts of the broken toilet in my home, before settling down and closing my eyes to fix it. Hardly the most exciting dream, nor one that I am overly eager to repeat again anytime soon.
I suppose it also helped to teach me how—as with so many things in life—even from the most terrible experiences, born out of unbearable moments of hardship and pain, the most precious and unexpected of miracles can blossom.