This represents only the second time a story has come to me in a dream. I have a very rational mind, even the subconscious part apparently, because from my mid-twenties onward whenever I began having a nightmare my lucid mind would interject and say, “This is absurd, it can’t be real, you’re having a nightmare.”
With the nightmare that inspired ‘The Old Coach Inn’, however, that interjection didn’t happen. The motel’s weird ‘hospital’ quality and its occupants departing en masse were as described in the story, and in the dream the motel’s restive spirits possessed my son.
Sometimes upon waking from a dream I believe it will translate to a good story, but the next morning I usually can’t remember what it was, or just lose all enthusiasm for it. That didn’t happen with ‘The Old Coach Inn’ either. The high concept – ‘terrified people piling out of a haunted motel all at once’ – struck me as both a wonderful image and an unusual take on the haunted house trope. The dream wasn’t set in 1980, though, so why the story ended up there I don’t know (early iterations were called ‘Terror in 1980’). It was one of those semi-voluntary choices that happen during the imaginative process. But once it did, I ran with it, and it was pleasantly nostalgic to visit the world as it was when I was Adam’s age.
Speaking of Adam, his fate was in doubt because the dream didn’t provide a clear ending. I agonised over it for days, running several scenarios through my head. Ten years ago I don’t think the spirits would have given him back, but I am so susceptible parental horror these days that I devised a way for him to survive.
Kris Ashton 