Coincidence or something more? The dreams that made up the novel

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird began as a nightmare 10 years ago and popped up as a recurring nightmare over the years. The story was structurally the same from the very first nightmare. A young man is told by a stranger in front of him that the plane that they are o, the one that just took off, is going to crash. The catch is that he is NOT to prevent it from happening because he is one of four survivors. It becomes clear that the survivors are sitting behind him, the pretty Brazilian girl and the couple behind her. I woke up right when it was getting too scary.

Subsequent dreams included the scene where the Being attacks him in the bathroom in the person of the old woman. At first the "Why didn't you obey?" rant didn't make sense to me. After failing to come up with an alternative encounter, I wrote it out as I saw it in my dream. The next day I was on I-95 listening to a sermon on Genesis 3 and how it nailed the very problem of mankind. "Why didn't we obey?" the preacher asked. As he went on I was fascinated that the old woman/Being was talking about our war against God's will. It was actually what my whole story was about! The revelation put me in such deep thought that I almost wandered of the road. Amazing. A vision that at first did not make sense defined my whole work and then gave me the solid ground I needed for my finale.

Another dream was the scene in the Pub where the passengers and crew are holding a twentieth-anniversary reunion of Flight 1220. Paul sees a vision of a Pub in the middle of the dessert that's holding this reunion and he finds that the owner of the Pub is an older version of himself. Older Paul's quote to the younger, "I am you, but you..are not yet me" came verbatim from my dream. This scene served to expose Paul's ulterior motive in preventing the crash as his own fear of going through such a terrible ordeal.

The scariest nightmare probably was the one that became the scene where the Being attacks Paul through the person of the bubble-headed blond stewardess. When she/It revealed that Paul's intervention will cost everyone on board their lives and the lives of everyone on board the plane they're about to hit, and she/It ended with "It's all your fault!", I woke up in a cold sweat.

Yesterday another detail snuck up on me as I remembered why Paul was on that flight. His parents had gotten him the tickets. How fitting for the metaphor of the plane ride as a life that is doomed to end one day. Flight 1220 represents our physical life; we've taken off and the final destination is death. Our parents put us here, just as Paul's parents gave him the vacation. The odd thing is that I really hadn't thought about that until now, 4 months after publication.