Excerpt

MY WRITING CAREER BEGAN WITH A NIGHTMARE.

When I was young, just about the time the arguments between my parents were growing more and more heated, I began to have a recurring dream.

I stood on a promontory that stuck out from a sheer mountain like the prow of a ship, except there were no guardrails. I appeared in the dream with my hands out like a tightrope walker, looking over the breathtaking drop, the distant mountains, and a single house on the ground far below, so far below that it could have been a satellite snapshot.

My heart raced, and I fought the vertigo. I didn't know how I'd come to be on the cliff; all I knew was that I needed to get the hell away from that edge as fast as I could. The ground of the promontory was flat, and there was no wind, but it felt like I was being drawn toward the edge.

I backed away, feeling better with every step. One step… One more… And one more… My racing heart began to calm with each inch I retreated.

I bumped into something.

My gaze had been fixed on the tip of that promontory and the empty expanse of air. I hadn't been looking where I was going, and when I turned, I came face to face with—

Nothing.

In front of me was the ever-thickening base of the promontory. A short distance away, it connected to the mountain and a friendly looking path continued both ways along the edge. Safety. Security.

But I couldn't get to it. There was some kind of invisible wall in front of me. I was blocked.

I pushed at it. Nothing. I beat my fists on it. Nothing. I started to move toward the edge, to see if there was a gap—

The invisible wall started moving toward me, pushing me away from the safety of the mountainside, pushing me toward the drop.

"No!" I shouted at the thing and redoubled my efforts, pounding with my fists, but it was as solid as stone. It didn't shimmy, shudder, or budge in the slightest.

Terror coursed over me like icy water as I flipped around and put my back against it, feet scrabbling on the sandstone as it pushed me inexorably toward the edge.

Fifteen feet… Ten feet… Five feet…

All I could hear was the painful thumping of my heart as I reached the point where I'd appeared at the beginning of the dream. I scrabbled harder, feet sliding, shouting.

Mercilessly, the invisible wall pushed me over the edge.

I fell, screaming and screaming, falling so long that my ragged throat hurt as the ground rushed up at me and—

I awoke, sitting up in bed, breathing hard.

In the following days, though I didn't tell anyone about my dream, I asked about dreams, about falling dreams in specific. I didn't ask my parents, but instead my junior high school friends.

I heard lots of stories, but the one that stuck with me was this: if you hit the ground in a falling dream while you're asleep, you die in real life.

Junior high wisdom.

The dream didn't come to me every night, and it didn't come regularly. I would get a few nights' rest. Sometimes I'd get a few weeks. Never more than a month. And then, at random…

The nightmare would return.

It was always the same.

I appeared on the precipice. I tried to leave. I was blocked by the wall. The wall started moving and pushed me over the edge. I fell and fell and—

I woke up.

The arguments between my parents in real life heightened. I remember my mother losing a lot of money in a business venture. I remember my father yelling at her as she left the house, telling her that if she didn't get back inside, he'd kick her butt right through her teeth.

At night, the nightmare continued. The same every time. In the dream, my chest hurt at the terror, and I'd wake up with it still hurting.

I told no one.

I had other nightmares. Demons would come for me at night, and I'd run away from them. But those dreams changed every time. The falling nightmare was always the same.

Things progressed with my parents, and they separated. My father moved away to California. We stayed in Colorado. I progressed through junior high and into high school.

During my sophomore year, when we were living in one of the string of shabbier and shabbier apartments my mom could afford, the nightmare changed.

Or rather, it's more accurate to say: I changed it.

That night, I appeared a couple feet from the tip of the promontory, just as always.

On many other nights, I had tried everything I could to get past the barrier. I'd sprinted toward it to see if I could get past it before it formed. I'd leapt high to see if there was a way I could get over it. I'd tried to sneak around the edge to see if I could circumvent it.

Nothing had worked.

In the wake of my parent's divorce, though, something had broken inside me. I was still terrified of the wall, still terrified of the fall, but I was also angry now. I hated how my happy little life had been blown apart. I hated how my parents couldn't keep things together. I hated how, up until this moment, I'd thought they knew everything about everything. I realized now that they didn't, that they were just as confused and fucked up as everyone else.

Most of all, I hated the futility of this nightmare. No matter what I did, I couldn't escape it. There was no safety here.

I strode to the wall, put my hands on it, felt the cool, hard nothingness against my cheek. It began its inevitable push that, in about fifteen seconds, was going to dump me over the edge.

I shoved away, spun in mid-step, and sprinted toward the tip of the promontory. I ran as hard as I could, arms pumping at my sides. I couldn't stop the damned wall from shoving me over the edge, but I could sure as hell deny it the pleasure.

I reached edge and I leapt off.

Air rushed past me. I winged my arms spastically, and I screamed—part terror, part rage. I couldn't stop from falling… I was going to hit again, just as before.

Then I heard a voice inside me. It wasn't my voice. Or maybe it was. A voice of some future self, some wiser self. To this day, I don't know where it came from. It said:

If you can just hold yourself together… If you can just hold yourself together… you can fly.

I didn't know what that meant, or how I was supposed to use it to fly, but suddenly it felt like my body wanted to come apart in six pieces. My arms and legs wanted to fly away from my torso. My head wanted to fly off my neck. It felt like I was being pulled apart by the force of the very air.

Screaming through my gritted teeth, I held myself together. The air rushed by me. The ground rushed closer.

And I saw something I hadn't seen before.

A line of tall posts strung power lines one to the next, off into the distance.

The force of my leap had taken me out from the cliff. I was not falling to the base anymore. I realized with the first flash of hope I'd had since this stupid nightmare had started that I might be able to make it to those power lines.

Thinking that seemed to angle me toward them. I hit them, and like some Looney Tunes character, I hit with my feet, the wire bowed nearly to the ground…

And shot me back up into the air.

I screamed again, but this time with exhilaration. I hadn't hit the ground. I was still falling but… upward.

The arc came to its zenith, inevitably, and I began to fall to the ground again. I felt that sense of being pulled apart.

I held myself together.

And I saw the house, that house I'd seen from so far above, but this time it was at a much more manageable distance. The roof was comparatively huge, and I realized if I could just hit that house, that sloped roof, I might bounce again.

And I did.

My feet hit and I launched. I didn't have the powerful spring of the wire this time, but my leap flung me a good ten feet into the air. Now I was only twenty-five feet from the ground. All I needed was something cushy, something…

A dilapidated old couch hunched at the side of the house, clearly left out in the weather to be taken to the dump.

I landed on it, sprung five feet into the air and…

I landed on the ground.

At first, I simply couldn't believe it. What kind of ridiculous string of unlikely events could have landed me on the ground, but…

Here I was. I was standing on solid earth. I had beaten the invisible wall! I'd beaten that stupid cliff and its stupid promontory.

I looked behind me, saw the thing looming, looking down on me impassively. I shouted at it and gave it a one-finger salute.

I danced around in victory, looking at the cliff, at the power lines, at the house, at the couch, and at the distant mountains. I must have danced like that for five minutes.

And then I awoke. Not with my heart hammering, not with my chest hurting. I awoke with a smile.

The next night, the nightmare came again. I did the same thing. I sprinted. I leapt. Powerlines. House. Couch. Ground.

The next night, it came again, as though to check one final time. I sprinted. I leapt. Powerlines. House. Couch. Ground.

That was the last time I ever had the dream. I never saw that cliff again, except in my memories.

The day after, a new dream started. I began in the wide-open field beyond the cliff. I knew that's where it was, but I never turned around to look at the cliff or the house. The power lines were just behind me, but I was focused on the field and the mountains in the distance. I found that, by exerting my will and angling my hands just-so, I could lift my body up into air. I could fly!

I was free.

The day after that, I began writing my first book, about heroes in a fantasy world, doing the impossible.

To this day, whenever I feel in over my head, whenever it feels like my life is sliding into the toilet, I get that same sensation of my body being pulled apart in those six pieces. I hold them together.

And every time, I've come through the hardship.

This was how writing began for me.