With the recent passing of actor Brian Dennehy, I got to thinking about the weird way I sometimes dream. Don’t worry those two disparate concepts do eventually tie together.

People when they are asleep dream in sorts of manners. My sister has told me that her dreams are in black and white and only in two dimensions like something from an old television show. Personally, I dream in full color three-dimensional glory in absolute fidelity. In fact, when I awaken from a dream there may be several moments when I have to sort out what is reality and what was dream. We’re not talking delusional things like nightmarish monster and the like but if I dreamt of eating an apple then I will wake up with the taste still lingering in my mouth and I have to take note that I was not actually having one. But full realism is not where I find that my dreams are the oddest.

Sometimes I dream movies.

I don’t mean that I dream about movies, though that has happened but rather my dreams become films. Occasionally I will be in one of the film dreams as a character but there have also been instances where I never appear in the story at all and I’m observing it like any other movie.

Dennehy appeared in one of my nightmares. This is one of those movie dreams where I watched and did not find myself inside of it as a doomed character. Dennehy, Anthony Perkins (of Psycho, though he had already passed when I had this nightmare) and a woman whom I did not recognize take a small boat into icy waters to retrieve cannisters of toxic waste that they had illegally dumped. They have to move the barrels before authorities discover the crime. The woman really really hates Dennehy’s character but the backstory reasons are never revealed. Diving for the waste they are attacked by eel-like monsters. Perkins is killed and the two survivors end up stranded on a rock jutting from the sea trapped by the eel/monsters.

I used the nightmare as inspiration for a short story “Araceli” that appeared in my collection Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Tales of Technology and Terror. I have always felt that nightmares are gifts for my creativity.