An Author Tells All

MORNING OF APRIL 12, 2008

First I remember driving through a city, possibly Atlanta, GA, and seeing a huge billboard. The billboard featured and promoted one of the old characters I used to often draw. Rather than feeling like someone was stealing from me, I felt a little excited to see one of my characters on a big billboard. I also felt a burning need to find out what exactly was being promoted.

I remember talking to Richard about it, and he said he'd seen those billboards around, too, and had been meaning to tell me about them.

Then I was in the car with Katie, taking her to show her the original billboard. I parked my car at a gas station across the street and got out to take a picture of the sign. After snapping a few shots, I went inside the gas station, which looked like a restaurant inside. I can't remember what I did there. After a while, Katie came in and said she was tired of waiting in the car.

Then the dream changed to where I was talking to an author about the books he wrote. It may possibly have been Stephen King, as I've read a few of his books lately. He told me the story for his latest book, and as he spoke, I could see it in my mind like a movie:

There was a young man in the hospital for a sickness. One day he was visited by a man with a strangely scarred face. The scarred-man showed much sympathy towards the hospital-man, and yet the latter did not understand why.

The man in the hospital had gone to summer camp every year as a child. There had always been a group of bullies at the summer camp that gave he and some of the other kids a hard time. The kid they gave the hardest time was an especially awkward little kid who just lived in his own world and did weird things all the time. There was a camp counselor who was very kind to and protective of the kids who were taunted by the bully kids.

They had a bonfire party on the last night of camp. The bully kids knew the awkward outcast kid liked fireworks, so they gave him a bunch and convinced him to throw them in the bonfire all at once. When he did, it blew up the whole camp and killed almost everyone.

The man who was now in the hospital as an adult had been one of the few survivors that night long ago. He suddenly realize the badly scarred man that had now come to visit him had been the friendly counselor from the camp--badly scarred from the explosion, of course--and he had never known before now that he had survived.

This was supposed to be such a shocking ending to the story, and in the logic of the dream it seemed to me genius.

Then I was looking through a stack of ratty old paperbacks I had found somewhere. I think perhaps they were supposed to have once belonged to one of my family members.

One of the paperbacks was some kind of tawdry vampire/romance novel. It had a painted picture on the cover that looked like it could have been done by Boris. The foreground was a well-built man with long, blonde hair sitting on a sofa (you could tell he was the vampire of the story). Behind him, near a door in the background, was an attractive woman in a white, sheer nightgown.

The woman's face had a hologram sticker on it, so that when you turned it one way you saw her face, and when you turned it another you saw a skull. I flipped through the novel and saw there were many of these hologram pictures throughout the book. I found it to be very strange, and more than a little cheesy.