On June 29, 1993, I wrote my first short story. If you were a member of my Patreon page, One Step Forward, then you know that story is called, Chuckie, and was based on a nightmare I had multiple times. You also know how the story came about. But here, at Type AJ Negative and this thing I call The Concepts, you probably don’t know anything about that. Today, I give you the story—the full story that has never appeared anywhere outside of Patreon.

I was twenty-two in June of 1993. On the day—early morning, really—I wrote Chuckie, it was eight days from my birthday. Before I get into that particular day (which is really short, to be honest), I want to tell you about what led to it.

A few weeks earlier, maybe longer, I can’t really remember, I began having nightmares. Time has a way of running together. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years … decades … they all run together at some point. Things you remember completely when they first happened become dull around the edges over time. Details get lost or exaggerated upon, and as a writer, my job is to exaggerate the truths while telling all sorts of lies. But those nightmares. I remember them quite well.

I was in a house, but I wasn’t me. I was a kid named Chuckie Benson. He had blond hair and blue eyes and was bigger than my lanky 150 pounds at the time—oh and I had dark black hair. These days, it’s more on the gray side than black. The doorbell rings, which was definitely not a reality in the house I grew up in. No, there was no doorbell, only knuckles on wood. In the dream Chuckie—me—opens the door and there stands Alex, who looked like a burned up weenie with a sinister grin that was mostly teeth, and well, not really a grin. Alex didn’t have a last name in the dream or even in the original version of the story I wrote. When I rewrote the story, I gave him the last name of Morrison, since I was a Doors fan. 

I always ran through the house trying to get away from Alex only to run back into him. He would grab me by the throat in his still smoldering hands and choke me. At that point, I woke, not screaming or shooting up in my bed the way you see in movies. My eyes just snapped open, and I was awake, my heart crashing hard in my chest and staring at the darkness of my room. 

I had this dream quite a few times, almost nightly for a while there. This was bad for a couple of reasons, the biggest of these being sleep. I already struggle with sleep—had since I was about fourteen—and with this recurring nightmare, sleep became nonexistent. 

Then one day someone asked me, “Hey, are you okay? You look tired?”

“I haven’t been sleeping,” was my answer.

From there a conversation was had based on my lack of sleep. I mentioned the nightmares and how terrifying they were for me.

“Why don’t you write your nightmare down the next time you have it?”

“Why?”

“That might make it go away.”

That’s hoodoo magic nonsense I believed. I think the individual who told me that caught my thoughts on my face before I could even say anything.

For the next few paragraphs, I will relay to you what was relayed to me, in as much detail as I can remember. These are the words I was told:

There was once a writer—a very good writer—who suffered from having nightmares, specifically, one nightmare over and over and over. He got to where he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t function, and couldn’t write. He went to his doctor and told him what was going on.

The doctor said, “The next time you have the dream, get up and write it down. Writing it down will make the nightmare go away.

The writer, desperate for some relief and sleep thought it couldn’t hurt.

That night he had the nightmare. When he woke, he got up and spent the next three hours writing the nightmare down. When he went back to bed, he didn’t have the nightmare, but the next night, lo and behold, the nightmare was back.

The writer went back to his doctor and took what he wrote with him. He explained to the doctor that he had done what he was told to do.

“Let me see what you wrote,” the doctor said.

The author handed him the papers. The doctor spent the next little while reading it, then shook his head. “I see what the problem is,” he said.

“What?” the writer asked.

“What you wrote is the nightmare.”

“That’s what you said to write.”

“Yes, but you’re a writer. All you did was write the basic details of the nightmare. You didn’t write the story the nightmare is trying to tell you. Next time you have the nightmare, write the story it is telling you.”

A couple nights later, he had the nightmare again. He got out of bed and spent the next three days writing the story of the nightmare. He never had the nightmare again.

That was the story told to me. Of course, with a story like that, I, like anyone who heard it would do, asked, “Who was the writer?”

“Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“Really?”

“And the story was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Now, as with any story told like this, I was skeptical. Still, I was desperate for sleep. The next time I had the nightmare, which was the very next night, I got out of bed, pulled out a note pad—what people refer to as scratch pads now—and a pen. I spent the next couple of hours writing the bare bones story of Chuckie Benson and Alex Morrison. 

After I was done, I laid back down. I didn’t fall back asleep that night. However, I never had the nightmare again.

Here’s my caveat for this Concept: I’ve never been able to substantiate the story told to me about the writer or the story. I mean, the story does exist, and the author was a real person. But I’ve found no record or truth of how the story came to be. It very well may be true. Or it very well may be something made up in the mind of someone playing shrink and offering a solution. 

Either way, it did work for me, and that’s what matters here. Oh, and the fact that writing that story springboarded me into writing, something I loathed up until then. Other than jokes and parody songs, I hated the very idea of constructing a story. In school, I did the bare minimum to get by with a D-. 

The story—true or false as it may be—of the supposed nightmare Robert Louis Stevenson had that led to The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, remedied my own nightmares and spurred a love for writing that has never passed, and here it is three decades later.

Until we meet again, my friends, be kind to one another.

A.J.