A Fragment from the Dreamscape

People often ask writers: ‘Where do you get you ideas from?’ It is a fair question, yet many authors sweat when answering. You can see guilty beads of moisture tracking the lines in their foreheads.

This is because most writers are thieves. We steal ideas. File down the ISBNs and respray or break them up for parts to be shipped out to distant lands. Illicitly obtained Peugeot 505 gearboxes go to Port Harcourt, plot devices go to Arthur Machen’s Baghdad of the mind.

In defence of my profession, it should be noted that poverty plays a part in most crime. According to Denis Johnston, there are only eight basic stories. With millions of writers around, that equates to a real shortage of resource and a breeding ground for criminality.

Some writers claim not to be thieves. They style themselves ‘literary DJs’. Remixing, sampling syntax and characters, pumping up the plot. Others claim to be scavengers, salvage merchants, saviours of stories that would otherwise be scrapped. Even when this narrative is self-consumed, it remains just a distracting lie. Every writer is a thief. Every one of us.

I could try to claim cleaner hands. Point out that I deal in non-fiction. No law against taking facts during empty afternoon raids on Kew. I even pay fair coin to my stranger sources. Vodka and tonic, a curry or provable gossip for sharing buried news. Tell me what is on the missing Diana tapes and I will tell you which of Philip’s bastards is scouting for a ghost writer to dish the dirt. Libertarian memories of the man behind Guido Fawkes for on the level fact about Charles Kennedy. Information brokerage. Legitimate exchange.

However, facts are not the same as ideas. The question remains: ‘Where do you get you ideas David?’ The answer is always the same, always honest. Dreams, talks and walks. There has been a shortage of curry conversations in July, so it has all been walks that drift unknowingly into Baghdad-on-the-Thames and dreams.

I do not know how it works for other writers, but for me the dreams that provide ideas come in two broad forms. In the first, I will find myself possessing the body of an alternate me in a parallel dimension. A place where I am guilty of fiction and published by Gollancz.

I twitch inside this other David Southwell. Make him switch on his computer to see the drafts of his latest project or else force him to pull his published books from the shelves. The Scarlet Faction by Tim Dedopulos and David Southwell; Before The Blood by Matt Adams and David Southwell; The Far Lands by Stephen Grasso and David Southwell; the collected Hellblazer comics. Half a Dozen Doctor Who novels written alongside Sean Twist. The Sherlock XIII series. In these dreams, I attempt to read as much as I can; I do as all authors do and steal. I could try to spin it, but taking my ideas from an alternate me is still literary theft.

In the second type of dream I take directly from the landscape and inhabitants of what Machen’s Baghdad. Map its streets; make surreptitious word sketches of faces I see dining in its restaurants. I sit alone in its bars, pilfering overheard conversations, recording them with my shorthand scratch.

Every dreamtime experience is mine for the taking. I can steal without fear of repercussion in this ideaspace, knowing that within hours I will be beyond reach of any law operating here. Safely over the Theta state line, safely across the border of sleep. If I ever manage a decent night’s sleep again, the Baghdad security force will nab me and I will be up upon a charge of grand larceny.

There will be those who do believe my answer as to where my ideas come from. They will assume it is my Verbal Klimt improvisation to excuse and justify my crimes, who think: ‘He is a writer, therefore a proven thief and liar’. There is little I can provide to counter such thoughts. I could try calling Alan Moore as an expert witness; cite his work on Machen as a record of case law. Then again, those who do not wish to believe ideas arrive fully formed from dreams are unlikely to be swayed by the testimony of a man who worships Glycon.

In terms of hard evidence, I doubt dream journals are classed as admissible. Regardless, here is a record of last night’s journey through the territory of the Oneiroi.

‘Albion at the margins of the 1348 apocalypse. Empty fields. Abandoned. After the abnormal, constant summer rains, everyone was expecting famine as the grain rotted on the stalk. Worse came when plague robbed the landscape of enough men to work it. Blighted vegetation, mutating under the cover of mist that will not yield to a watered down sun. Skeleton thin livestock left to fend from themselves stagger across the blistered and black earth.

It is a time of crows. Breakdown of social order. All law a hollow memory. Knights Hospitalier colonies fallen to ruin. No one to protect the crossroads. All maps mock the living. England now a country of abandoned ghost villages, the only inhabitants are the unburied dead that once inhabited them. Pilgrims and outbreak refugees alone on green lanes drained of all colour except the black and grey palette of road turned to mire. High death rate for abbeys and monasteries. Two thirds of all England’s clergy dead. Mass burials. Mud pregnant with corpses.

Rumours of infection and Judgment Day as rife as the plague itself. Doomsday cults and heresies infect all belief. Antisemitc riots, the plague seen as a Jewish conspiracy. Mass penitence processions drudging on across several days. There is so much death, even the Pope is forced to abandon any pretence of established doctrine, declares all plague victims saved. Seeking ways to assuage the wrath of God has become political imperative.

Hoodoo Crow Men try to arrange contracts with the old powers to keep their patch free of contagion. Village militias murder outsiders on the roads to keep any possibility of disease from passing through. Plague Doctors tour the country, peddling false hope. They all wear the same uniform of fear: a hat to denote their status as a doctor; a mask with crystal eyes and the spice-stuffed beak to purify the air; a wooden stick to push away victims who get too close; leather gloves; a waxed gown and full-length boots.

On the Border, Scots see the pestilence in England as a punishment of God on their enemies. They gather an army to strike while the English are defenceless. However, before they can march, plague hits their ranks. Pursued by English forces, the Scots flee north, spreading the plague deep into their homeland. First flood, then famine, plague and war. All horsemen free, Albion as a territory of hell.

An inquisitor for the local prince-bishop makes his way across the landscape. Moving towards an abbey suspected of heresy. Moving into the reach of Lord Carfax – the local embodiment of authority who is suspected of diabolism. Moving towards a church where a Doom mural is being painted. It shows people dancing with a crowned bear; a bridge of spikes; St. Michael wielding a flaming sword, leading an army of saints against a legion of living skeletons. The mural intended as both prophecy and protection from the plague.

The mural reflects the sense that the tide of life and light looks like it will be permanently out across all Europe. The sea of civilisation rolled back to reveal primal horrors; deep fears now free to surface and roam. The inquisitor is the protagonist, moving towards his role in a vampire story. All vampire fiction as a fear of plague, infection, contamination and contagion from the outside.’

This is a fragment from the dreamscape. A note scratched into the dreamtime Moleskine. I probably will never transmute it to fiction, never be published by Gollancz. However, I hope it at least helps clear up one third of the ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ question.