Sleep isn't rest for my overactive mind.
by Delilah Devlin

Just the process of lying down and clearing my head doesn't do the job of easing me into dreamtime. Those moments when I finally let my crazy mind empty are the ones where my muse sneaks in to detonate a new bomb.

Night before last, I lay down, glanced at the mirror above my dresser with the reflection of my digital alarm glaring in the glass, and WHAM! These waking dreams are like movie reels that play in my head.

The scene that followed that particular night creeped me out so badly I had to turn on the lights and check out the mirror before I could get my heart to slow down again. But that's how it works. Too bad you won't be able to read the story I'm building from that little snippet from my overactive imagination for a while. *shudder*

Getting to sleep can be pretty frustrating with all those starts and stops. I keep my tape recorder beside the bed to capture bits of dialogue that come to me, when the characters I've been working with all day finally decide to spill their
guts. Sometimes, I have to get up, head to the office, and fire up the computer to get my notes down.

If I could nap during the day, it wouldn't be such a bad thing, but I haven't napped since I was on maneuvers in the field with the military years ago. So, many days, I'm grumpy and sleep-deprived which is
probably why I have so many cranky heroines.

Deep sleep, the kind I can't pull myself from when the ideas begin to flow, can
be the scariest. I also can't seem to influence where those dreams go, can't rewind and follow another path if it's not proving productive like my near-sleep dreams. Instead, I follow the roller coaster and hope that at the end I have a good time, a good scare, or at least something colorful to reflect on.

One time I dreamt I was an archeologist aboard a small boat off the coast of Santorini. I was a diver and the team I worked with underwater found an ancient box. When we pulled it up, I had this horrible feeling we shouldn't open it, but
my boyfriend (I'm pretty sure he was a bearded Colin Farrell) took it to his cabin to scrub away barnacles and I went to shower.

When I came out of my room, the boat was completely empty. Well, of course, the box belonged to Pandora and I was the heir to THE POWER, which was why I wasn't incinerated off the boat like the rest of the ash piles I found, including poor Colin.

Haven't used that in a story yet. Probably won't ever. Colin isn't my idea of the sexiest man on the planet and I was a little ticked my subconscious hadn't chosen my then-current crush, Gerard Butler. But I'm sure aspects of that dream, the eerie atmosphere, the sense of complete isolation and confusion I felt will turn up somewhere.

The idea for my DARK REALM series didn't start with a dream. It started with a newspaper article about a flood near New Orleans that swept through cemeteries, leaving bodies and caskets lying alongside riverbanks. The description stayed
with me and, when I started to plot my city of vampires, I knew I'd use it somewhere in the series.

SEDUCED BY DARKNESS begins with a flood overtaking a cemetery and setting a monster free. However, the monster escaping from his crypt, and the vivid, horrific imagery of that scene, came straight from one of my near-sleep dreams that again creeped me out so bad I had to get out of bed and write it down. You'll have to read it to understand why I got very little
sleep that night.

The horror aspects of my darker stories often come that way when I'm falling toward sleep. The sexier parts come from wide-awake daydreaming because I don't like to leave any of THAT up to a cranky muse--I want total control.