Gallows
Dreamed c.1956 by Stephen King
I guess probably the most striking example of using a dream in my fiction was connected to the writing of Salem's Lot.
It was a dream where I came up a hill and there was a gallows on top of this hill with birds all flying around it. There was a hanged man there. He had died, not by having his neck broken, but by strangulation. I could tell because his face was all puffy and purple. And as I came close to him, he opened his eyes, reached his hands out and grabbed me.I woke up in my bed, sitting bolt upright, screaming. I was hot and cold at the same time and covered with goosebumps. And not only was I unable to go back to sleep for hours after that, but I was really afraid to turn out the light for weeks. I can still see it as clearly now as when it happened.
Years later I began to work on Salem's Lot... [As] I was looking around for a spooky house, a guy who works in the creative department of my brain said, "Well, what about that nightmare when you were eight or nine years old? Will that work?" And I remembered the nightmare and I thought, "Yes, it's perfect."
SOURCE: Deirdre Barrett's The Committee of Sleep, 2001, p.46-7; she cites an interview in Naomi Epel's Writers Dreaming (1994) p. 134-6
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