And Nothing But The Truth...

I guess the question I get asked more than anything else is if this whole Night Lights Cast Shadows thing is for real.  And my answer is yes and no.

Yes, I have nightmares.
Not night terrors.
Not night sweats.
Not hallucinations.

Nightmares.
Good old-fashioned bad dreams.
I dream of horrible deaths to people I don't know;
Of strangers without faces and
Of children without a chance.
I dream of rituals, sacrifices, murder and suicide.
I dream of monstrosities that would make most horror fiction blush.
Various creatures stalk my mind and monsters grab tight my imagination.  They creep into my sleep and torture me, causing me a mental pain that is quite hard to even put down into words.
Sometimes, I feel that I am not fully conveying their influence and I hold quite a number of self-pity parties, cursing them on choosing me to haunt.  Then, in my next breath I feel a certain honor that I have been given this endless bounty of hell to deal with, to mold these nightmares into stories and to share them with others.
Is it a gift?  A curse?  A joke?

I've been trying to figure that out for years...

The first nightmare I can remember is from my youth and is one of the most vivid to my memory.
(  Read it here.  )

After that first nightmare, it was all downhill.
One minute I was imitating WWF with my brother and the next, I was struggling just to fall asleep at night.  Looking back, it was an awfully young age to begin such a journey, but hell, others have had rougher childhoods (check out Augusten Burroughs for that) and I tried to put it behind me.
It wasn't until years later that I really began to understand the abnormality of it all.  One day, I woke up and realized that other people weren't having these kinds of dreams and I might want to start taking account of it all.  So, I started writing them down.  And now, I have a collection of journals that reveal all kinds of crazy. This is what I use for my stories on Night Lights Cast Shadows.  This is what I share with you...   an awful truth and a false absurdity.

Yes, I really do have nightmares.
Yet, if you follow this blog closely, I'm sure you realize that most of what I post is up for debate.
Does Bigfoot really exist?  
Are there alien abductions?  
Could unicorns really spark a revolution?

So, I guess this Night Lights Cast Shadows operation is real, at least to me.  It's my outlet and my chance to share my writing and my voice and my crazy with all of you.
If you'd like to, you can feed your crazy by reading more of my nightmares.
Or bookmark my website to stay connected with all of the social networking sites I haunt.

:)

Stay Spooky, my Creepsters.
And thank you for listening.
Thank you for spending a bit of your time with me.

Creep On,
~dpb~