I found myself with an insatiable desire for something dramatic. I wanted my life to take a turn in any direction. School was dragging on and I couldn’t recall the last time I had experienced anything noteworthy. I always had a passion for the horror genre and things macabre. Nightmares, ghosts, ghouls, and monsters were all interesting to me ever since I was a little kid. I wanted something interesting to happen, something otherworldly.

So, I tried to force a phenomenon on myself.

I lived alone in an apartment during my junior year at Drexel University. It was just off campus at 33^rd and Hamilton Street. It was a nice studio, with custom old gold-painted walls and decorated with a variety of black-framed pictures and paintings. The room itself had an Egyptian feel to it, felt mystical and rich. It was just enough room for one person and was dimly lit.

I often had a strange feeling in my apartment, one of containment and solitude. It was a place entirely cut off from other people and the hectic life I was living. Whenever I had this feeling I would immerse myself in the deepest, darkest movies I could find on TV. More often than not these would be old-school horror flicks like The Omen or indies like Donnie Darko.

I loved the way these movies could alter my state of mind and emotions; I could feel what the people in the films felt and I really enjoyed the connection. Because I had such a passion for these dramatic changes in my own state of mind, I decided to immerse myself further when I read online how diet and behavior can increase the chances for an occurrence of a nightmare.

I ate fried foods and sugary snacks late at night for an entire month. The dried-out taste in my mouth from all the caffeinated soda, and the incredible sloth I felt in every fiber of my being, soon propelled me toward what would become the most emotionally affecting nightmare I’ve ever had.

I began to feel extreme apathy. Just thinking about a homework assignment filled me with frustration and aggravation. Any little task I had to complete was a terrible bother to me and I could feel that my fuse was as short as the plastic end of a shoelace. I was edgy, irritable, and lazy. Dishes piled high in my sink, food containers scattered my desk and table, and the blue glow of the television bathed my face daily. My little studio quickly became a festering room of negativity. The constant mess, awful diet, and lack of sleep I got all came together in one mighty gust of wind one night when I had slept for only a few hours.

It had been nearly a month since I had begun to try to induce a nightmare when one finally hit, hard and personal. In my nightmare I witnessed the death of my father, my mother grieving over his body, and myself left with the inevitable because of the bite of a zombie. Overplayed as the zombie concept may have been at the time, it’s a horrifying experience to truly believe that you’re going to die or become one, or at least to think so in a nightmare.

I awoke with a huge void inside of me. I felt like everything I had was ripped away from me and I was left standing alone. The cold sweat trickling down my face was a physical remnant of a mental torture. It took me all day to come to grips with what had been going through my mind during that nightmare. I hadn’t expected to have such an affecting dream, but it turned out to be much more than just a crappy day after it.

Post-nightmare, I felt like a new avenue was opened to me. I hadn’t ever been able to experience a tragic feeling of loss and sorrow like I did in that nightmare and so I had something new to write about. I played the nightmare over and over again in my head over the next couple of days as I cleaned up my apartment and returned back to my normal lifestyle. Not long after, I sat down to write about my nightmare in a story format.

As I wrote I realized that I had never before given a lot of thought to the emotions I put into my writing. Now, all I focused on while writing was conveying these powerful waves of emotions to whoever would read the story. Typically I had always tried to deliver a plot loosely based on the emotional decisions of characters in my stories. Now I could feel the anxiousness in my knuckles as I typed away furiously, trying to communicate my own emotions with words.

What I took from this experience was how much thought goes into my writing that I don’t pay any mind to. I had finally tapped into my subconscious for the first time and was using it. I grew as a writer from that nightmare, and I transformed everything I wrote into what I would call much more mature pieces of work that hit closer to home for readers.

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