MUSE MONDAY
Please welcome my guest today, CJ Zahner. This post will curl your toes.
Thanks
so much for inviting me Brenda. My novel, Dream Wide Awake, was inspired many
years ago on a night I met fright. I was sleeping in the attic of my grandparent’s
home—just like LeeLee in chapter three.
In
a pitch-black hour, I awoke when someone grabbed my hand. My arm was wedged
between the head board and mattress of my bed. I felt someone’s fingers slip
into mine and when I opened my eyes, he didn’t let go.
I
say “he” because I was sure I clasped hands with a devil. I didn’t see him, but
could feel him with every inch of my three-year-old being. I screamed and my
mother came and lifted me into her arms, pulling me from his grip. She said I
was dreaming, but I knew better.
Fast
forward fifty years. This single incident, still so alive in my memory, inspired
Dream Wide Awake. The story is
fiction, but the setting in chapter three is my grandparent’s attic. My own
grandmother was bedridden as in the novel, my mother did have to help nurse
her, and my parents, brother, and I moved into a makeshift apartment in her
attic.
How
impacting was that single incident of feeling someone’s grip in the night?
Well, one, I have never once slept with a hand dangling over the side of the
bed since, and two, it inspired a novel.
The novel
Dream Wide Awake is a
paranormal thriller about a family of seers. And at the risk of having some
people think I’m crazy and others ask what their future holds, I’ll admit I
have had an occasional premonition. My most substantial one being a vague
forewarning of 9/11.
For
two months before the twin towers fell, I had visions that I was approaching a northeastern
American city, near water, from a plane’s eye view. The image came (and there
is no sane way to describe this) as a movie in my head. First, I was in the sky
moving, and next, I was in a building and the gray floor boulders were buckling
beneath me. The building was collapsing.
I
kept notes of this vision on my big July desk calendar. Wouldn’t throw it out
at the end of July or August because I was sure a building was going to fall. On
September 11th when the first building collapsed, I dug my calendar
out from under a myriad of paperwork, and there were my notes. All contained in
the big box of the 11th of the month. I nearly passed out.
Hence
my belief: premonitions can be real. Do I believe in psychics and mediums, too?
Yes, to varying degrees.
As a freelance writer I once
interviewed a true medium, Anne Gehman. Gehman participated
alongside four other mediums in a University of Arizona professor’s afterlife
experiments. (The Afterlife Experiments,
Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of life After Death, by Gary E. Schwartz,
Ph.D. with William. L. Simon.) She said clairvoyance was like playing the
piano. Some people sat down and played naturally. Others, no matter how long
they trained on the keys, would never make great pianists. But some who practiced
long and hard did become proficient. This made me wonder.
Could children be trained to be psychic?
The notion
In Dream Wide Awake, three boys have been
abducted in a small town. Mikala Daly, a six-year-old girl from a normal
American family, is having visions of those boys, but her parents must hide her
sixth-sense abilities because of a governmental program called Project Dream.
The backstory is that after 9/11, the CIA
initiated an innovative national security test program. Twenty-five children
were removed from reformatory facilities across the country and placed in
Project Dream. The program’s purpose was to augment the adult remote-viewing
program. Scientists believed children might be more easily trained and more
successful in identifying threats to the American people and government through
remote viewing.
When the project produces stunning results,
they “recruit” seventy-five more children. Good kids without juvenile records.
Children selected had two main characteristics: a sixth sense and physical
superiority.
Mikala Daly’s aunt Rachel was one of the
original Project Dream kids, and now no one in Mikala’s family will divulge
Mikala’s gifts for fear the government will take her away to Project Dream, too.
Unbelievable? (Let me remind you of the immigration
debacle.)
This story is
fiction, not a premonition—I think…
Author Links:
Excerpt from Dream
Wide Awake, Chapter 1, Jack:
She was quiet, still, her
expression soft. Lip relaxed against lip. Then her eyes opened.
“He can see me.”
At first, because of her casualness,
he thought he’d surely heard her wrong. “Who can see you?”
“The bad man.”
His calmness faded to confusion.
He tightened his eyebrows. Premonitions, they called these episodes. His wife
experienced them, now his daughter. But they were never interactive.
“What do you mean he can see
you?”
“He said my name. He has a
guide.”
“A guide?”
“You know, Daddy, someone who
shows him movies. He knows who I am.”
“No, Mikala, the bad man does
not know who you are.”
“Yes, he does, Daddy.” For the
first time, he heard panic in her voice. “That’s the reason he is at Danny’s
house.”
A creak in the floor behind him
grabbed his attention, and he turned his head. Lisa darted from the bedroom,
ripped Mikala from his arms, and handed him something in her place.
“I told you not to allow this. I
said you were playing with fire.”
“Lisa, she’s wrong. He can’t see
her.”
“Yes, he can, Daddy.”
“No, he can’t, Mikala.” He
lowered his voice to sound stern.
“Yes—yes he can. He’s with Danny
right now. Run Daddy. Get Danny!”
“Go.” Lisa screamed so loud one
of the boys in the next room woke crying.
Jack looked down at his lap—at
the ratty sneakers Lisa had placed there. For the moment it took him to put
them on, he wondered if he should run or drive the block and a half to his
sister’s house. He decided, descended the stairs, and bounded out the front
door bare-chested, leaving Lisa behind switching on lights and talking into the
scanner. She would call for a cruiser to go to Janice’s house, to her own
house. But Mikala was wrong about Danny. She had to be. He was going to be in a
heap of trouble with the chief later.
He ran down the driveway and
disappeared into the black night within seconds. His legs turned over like an
Olympic sprinter’s, his breath labored, and sweat beaded on his upper lip. He
rounded Third Street and nearly slipped in the wet grass on Nevada Drive but
caught himself. He saw her house in the distance. Janice, four months separated
from her husband, was alone there with her son. Alone like the others. Three
single mothers of three abducted little boys.
His mind raced. The police would
be at his house in two minutes. At Janice’s in three. They protected each
other’s families.
When he was four houses away, he
began screaming his sister’s name. Trying to scare anyone off. Make the bad man
drop the child? Leave without the child? He didn’t know why he screamed. By the
time his feet hit her driveway her light had turned on. The front bedroom
window opened.
“Jack?” Janice’s voice slithered
through the screen.
He passed her window and ran
toward the back of the house, toward Danny’s room. He could see broken glass on
the ground shimmering with the reflection of a street light. Dear God, no, he thought. It couldn’t be. These
abductions could not have hit his family.
“Danny,” he yelled.
When he reached his nephew’s
window, the whites of Danny’s two little eyes glowed in the dark room. He was
there. Standing. Looking out the bare, open window back at him. Waiting.
“Hi, Uncle Jack,” Danny said,
his little face peeking over the window ledge, his stuffed bear, Tony, nudged
under his chin.
Jack leaned hands on house and
huffed, trying to catch his breath. Trying to decipher Danny was okay. Alive.
Mikala was wrong.
“Thank God, thank God,” he
uttered out loud. When he caught his breath, he gazed up at his nephew.
That’s when horror seized him.
Above Danny’s little face, secured on the broken glass, a scribbling on
Christian stationary paralyzed him. It was the abductor’s fourth message, but
the first to make Jack’s blood circulate like an electrical current. The words
he read flowed over his lips in a whisper, expelled with terrifying breath.
“One mulligan for Mikala.”
