At one point or another, I think everyone who works in a creative field turns to their dreams for inspiration. It seems like such a natural source of stories and images on the surface, but much like alcohol and chemical reality enhancement, it comes with its problems, pitfalls, and disappointments.

I thought this time out I’d look back at one of the times I wrote bits and pieces of a dream into my fiction—how it worked, how it didn’t, and why. It’s a tricky business bringing things back from the land of Morpheus—most of the time bits and pieces get left behind, or when you stick the images against a backdrop of plot and reality, their “power” is lost.

When I was younger I had a recurring dream. In this dream, I started out in a huge basement store-room underneath some sort of larger store. I was an exterminator, though I had no equipment for that work. Someone was after me, so I ended up back against the wall behind the rear unit of lines of shelves. It was very dark; the only light was from the helmet I wore. I came to a set of shelves I kept moving quickly behind the shelves toward large doors at the far end of the basement where trucks backed in to load and unload.

One set of shelves was blocked by dark clumps of something. When I got closer, it began to look as if it was a pile of realistic baby dolls. There were flies. I got closer, and I saw that it was piles of dead bodies. All of them were babies… but there was more. They had horns like devils. Some of them had wings, or tails. There were skulls, half-rotted bodies, and some that seemed fresh. For some reason it occurred to me at that moment that there were no rats near me. Whatever had done this—whatever left that gruesome pile behind the shelves, frightened rats so much they wouldn’t feed. Either that, or the small demon babies just weren’t fit for a rat. Either way, I knew I had to get out.

At this point the dream usually disintegrates. In most versions I’m chased out into a dark night by Romeroesque zombies. I’m not particularly frightened during any of this, and usually by the time I’m out of the basement, I’m no longer alone, and whoever I’ve found and I escape, or I wake up.

So I took that scene in the basement and wrote it down many years ago. I tried to tell the story to one of my buddies – I was in the Navy at the time—but in the telling I saw the flaws, and the utter lack of plot, characterization, or resolution. It was a chilling bit of nightmare movie that I played the starring role in—but on paper it wasn’t worth the ink it wasted.

So I let it sit on the hard drive, and I forgot about it. I do that a lot. I have snippets and bits of scenes that I’ve saved from larger failed works, or things I’ve started out going great guns writing, and found myself unable to finish. Many of them are resurrected in stories and novels. One of those evolved into the novel Ancient Eyes.

But I digress.

I wrote a story from my snippet of dream called “Burning Bridges.” It wasn’t very good. I tried too hard the first time to make the dream the story, and it failed. I needed to tie it into reality a little better, and I needed some characters to bring it to life. That story featured my fictional city of San Valencez, California, and ended up being the first time in print for what I hope will be a long running character, Tommy Doyle, the Psychos ‘R’ Us Cop.

The story finally found a home, after an intensive rewrite, in Marty Greenberg’s anthology All Hell Breaking Loose, and I think – just to see what you all think of how it worked out – I’ll leave you with the fictional version of the scene above.

From “Burning Bridges,”

The shadows were deeper than any Stan had ever seen. They gave the place an abandoned, cavernous appearance, and they gave him the creeps. The huge, multi-tiered shelving units that lined the walls loomed like eerie sentinels, stretching upward toward the amphitheater-like ceiling. Their silhouettes blended with the oozing darkness near the corners to form grey-on-black patterns of gloom.

The smell of rodents hung in the air; it was obvious that he had not been called in for just a routine job. There were rats here, lots of them, and it was going to be no picnic getting them out. Nothing he couldn't handle, but no quick fix, either.

The crawlspaces behind the shelves were the first targets to hit. Stan would eventually have to place some traps and baits higher up, among the shelves themselves, but the main nests would be on the lower levels. He suspected that there would be some breaches in the walls themselves, as well, though if his luck held they would lead to nothing more than small niches and caves, easily cleared of unwanted inhabitants.

The warehouse basement in which he stood was the lower story of the Colossus Fresh Air Food Mart. It was the largest grocery/department store in San Valencez, housed in a huge old stone building that covered a good city block. Stan wondered just how much food the citizens of San Valencez would buy from Colossus if they got a gander at—or a good whiff of—this warehouse. It was ancient, and it reeked of rot and decay. Most of the newer stock was kept in the middle sections, toward the front, but even these were poorly lit and covered with dust.

"We don't store much there anymore," Phil Barnett, Colossus' General Manager had told him the day before, "mostly bulk products and older merchandise. We've been meaning to clean the place up—put in some lighting, you know?—but we just never got around to it. Now we're having trouble getting stock workers to go down there at all. They complain about the smell, and a few people have spotted these rats..."

Damn surprising that they've only seen a few, Stan thought, walking over to the nearest of the shelves. From the smell the damned rats have more claim to this place than the people do.

There was another scent in the air that was beginning to bother him. It was familiar, something he'd experienced before, but he couldn't quite grasp the fleeting memories it induced. One thing he did know; the memories were not pleasant. It was a sickly sweet odor, like some sort of rot.

Surely the fuckers don't keep old meat down here? He thought. He shook his head. That wasn't quite it, but it was close.

Stan moved methodically from shelf to shelf along the first wall, placing the traps in what might have seemed to one not versed in "rodent war" tactics to be an almost random pattern. He filled each crack and crevice he encountered with small poisoned pellets, sprinkling more in piles along the wall. Every now and then a dark form darted deeper into the shadows, or glittering red eyes glared out at him from one of the deeper holes, but none of "the enemy" was brave enough for open confrontation. This behavior was strange, and it was enough, combined with the sheer intensity of the damp, chilling solitude of the basement, to make Stan more than a little nervous.

The smell he'd notice earlier grew stronger as he moved deeper. It was overpowering the scent of the rats themselves.

Rats are not a timid species, particularly when one lone animal--in this case Stan--invades their domain. Stan carried a semi-automatic .22 caliber pistol on his belt, and a large, Special Forces style combat knife strapped low on his right thigh. He'd had occasion more than once to use both. These rats, however, were not attacking. They seemed frightened, barely curious, and there were fewer and fewer signs of them as he neared the back of the huge room.

Stan hadn't gotten as old as he had by ignoring his senses, and they were screaming "Danger!" with a multitude of inner voices. His palms itched. Sweat gathered at the base of his neck, soaking his collar. His heart sped. That's when the memory hit him. He knew that smell, all right. Knew it like his most intimate nightmares. It was death—ignored, rotting death. He'd seen enough of it in the war to embed that stench in his brain, but it had taken the nervous tension of his growing fear to match it up with the proper memories.

One set of shelves to go. It was the longest of all, directly against the furthest wall of the warehouse. Many of the packages in this area had crumbled, unknown contents blending with one another to coat the floor in a powdery dusting of age and decay.

The shadows near the shelves were solid, heavier and more ominous. Stan knew that whatever the smell was waited for him behind that shelf. He knew, also, that it had nothing to do with rats. Not his concern. He could just turn around, walk away, and no one would know. Who would come back here to check and see if he'd omitted to set traps behind one set of shelves, this one in particular?

Stan started to turn. The sweat on his neck had gone to ice—prickling at his senses. The heaviness of the air weighed on his lungs.

Damn. He breathed. He couldn't do it. He wanted to know what was back there. He didn’t want to see it, but he had to know. He reached to the holster on his belt and pulled loose the .22. The gun felt very small and inadequate in the face of the unknown. He found himself, for the first time in years, yearning for the comforting weight of his M-16, or even a .45.

Shit, he said loudly, spinning around the corner of the shelves and stabbing into the shadows with the flashlight's beam. If there was something waiting it had been damned quiet as he approached.

At first there was only pitch-black shadow. In the flashlight’s beam, he could make out a few nondescript lumps scattered about randomly, much the same as all the other crawlspaces had held. The stench was overpowering, making his eyes water and further blurring his sight. He moved in, sweeping the light along the wall until it came to rest on the first of the lumpy objects. Stan wiped his eyes on his sleeve and squinted, concentrating.

The thing, whatever it was, was covered carefully with an oily rag. Using the toe of one boot, Stan kicked out and knocked the cover aside. He shone the light directly on the small oozing form—the tiny body. The child. He wanted to back away, to release the scream building in his throat, but his gaze was locked in morbid fascination on the rotted face, staring back at him from the dusty floor. It was wrong—three eyes, and there was a knotty, protruding lump on the side of the head—no, both sides. Like—horns.

Then Stan backed away, scrambling for purchase on the slick concrete. He skidded into the wall, cracking his head on the brick so hard it nearly drove him to his knees, but even then he was scrabbling backwards. Out. Somewhere along the line he dropped the gun. The flashlight banged heavily on the stone floor, the beam flickering weakly and threatening to go out. He clutched it to his chest like a talisman as he reached the main passage between the shelves.

Without further thought, he released the screams, turned, and ran for the door at the other end of the massive warehouse. Behind him, the silence mocked his retreat. Red eyes watched from the shadows—almost with sympathy.

From the Shadeaux,

DNW