Have you ever died in your dreams?

When I was a kid I remember my friends saying that if you died in your dreams you would die for real.

This really bothered me, since I died horribly in my dreams every night. There was no mystery as to why, with minimal acting ability, I did such a good job dying when playing army: run through, run over, blown away, set on fire, eaten alive, stitched with machine gun fire, skewered by an Apache arrow. No problem, I’d experienced it in my dreams. It is from these old dreams of my childhood that I draw a lot of imagery for my fatal fiction.

Most of my childhood dreams involved being chased by a grinning pirate with a knife and cutlass. Run as I might, my legs always felt like they were knee deep in water. And he would close in and butcher me, usually at the gate to the yard of my family house.

My worst dream death as a child was the time I was eating an entire plate of spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table. While I feasted greedily at the table animals, great and small scratched on the windows and doors, wanting some of my meal. I laughed at them, safe behind the walls of my parent’s house. I then drew a thick strand of spaghetti into my mouth ‘Italian style,’ twirled on a spoon, to suck it up obnoxiously like some Sicilian gangster in a movie. I looked at a bird pecking at the window to get in and bit through the pasta, but my teeth got stuck. The spaghetti had rubberized and became stuck to my teeth. I looked down to find that a large black spider had emerged from the pile of steaming spaghetti and was crawling up the strand to my face…

Then, a few months after I turned 15, the pirate began chasing me, and all of the animals from the spider dream gathered around to feast on the leavings. I then reached behind my back and pulled out a two-handed sword that was also a pump shotgun and went on a rampage, denuding the dream world that had tormented me for years of all its harrowing life forms.

Ever since, other than a few highly stressful periods in my life, my sleep has been free of nightmares. When I do have one, I feel lucky and use it in my fiction. That was, until last week, when I was cruelly deceived by a devil-in-sheep’s-clothing of a dream…

I got a call from a big New York publishing house, who wanted me to do a current Harm City book, to be issued as a hardback and made into an HBO miniseries. Now, as someone with a history of disastrous dreams, I can tell you, the surest sign that you are in a dream that is about to turn into a nightmare, is when something like that happens and you do not say to yourself, ‘Hey, this is too good to be true. Let me pinch myself to make sure.’

I find out that a big player among the Black Gorilla Family was on the run and wanted me to write his memoir before the cops got him. This was going to be an all night interview. I slinked down into West Baltimore with my pen and marble notebook and was admitted into a starkly barricaded crack-house.

As soon as I sat down to begin the interview, the BGF Commander and myself were attacked by his three traitorous henchmen. We fought them off with the kitchen cutlery that was being used to chop up crack. He fled, as did the two that I wounded. The one that he killed lay at my feet.

There I am with a body. I do the right thing and call the cops. Within five minutes the entire cast of CSI Miami is there processing the scene and suspicion is falling on me. Luckily there is a uniformed Baltimore City cop, who happens to look exactly like Heather Locklear with black hair, wearing the newly issued mini-skirt version of the uniform!

Again, I fail to pinch myself.

Officer Smoking Hot flips open her notepad, uncaps her pin with her pouty lips, and begins to take my information. Then, she looks up, purses her lips, and says, “The James LaFond? The Violence Guy?”

Thinking back to all of my negative views of cops posted on the site I began to apologize, “I’m really sorry about the Officer ManFriendly piece—but you know that was a County cop right?”

The CSI people evaporate.

I still don’t pinch myself.

She throws her notepad out the window and says, “I’m a huge Harm City fan!”

I still don’t pinch myself and say, “But I assumed that cops would hate me?”

She snarled playfully as she took her hairpin put, “Oh, those wimpy guy cops hate you. They have your picture clipped onto the targets at the range. But we hot girl cops, we can’t get enough Harm City!”

Then she shakes out her hair like a fairy tale stripper and the crack-house turns into a hotel suite, the crack-cutting table replaced by a king size bed with a headboard carved like a crown!

And I still fail to pinch myself!

Okay, if you have not read any of my fiction, you will be thinking, ‘What a self-serving fantasist. This goof is the star of his own Hugh Hefner-induced dream!’

If you have read any of my fiction, and you were watching my dream as an episode of LaFond’s Messed up Psyche, you would be screaming at the screen, “Get out of there J—she’s really a she-male assassin with chainsaw high heels!”

Now where were you guys when I needed you?

In my dream, still having failed to pinch myself, I’m trying desperately to recall what it was like way back when to proceed with the tasteful disrobing of a woman that did not just show up at my digs in a trench coat and high heels, with a bottle of booze. I mean what do they even wear and how does it come off?

I’m panicking, afraid I’m going to mess up somehow and disappoint this young beauty. I managed to rip off a bunch of stuff that really has no place as part of a law enforcement uniform and finally got to the Official Baltimore Police Department Issue g-string—and then I wake up.

No, I did not wake up for real. I woke up in my dream, my face on her perfect belly as I drool and snore like some fat old drunk in a recliner, and she shoves me off onto the cold hard floor of the abandoned crack-house. “You snooze you lose jerk!”

She didn’t even get dressed, just walked out the front door in her g-string, heels, and police utility belt, twirling the handcuffs over her head while I pleaded, “Come back!”

Then I woke up in a state of panic, my heart pounding against my chest wall.

On the upside, had I actually managed to have sex with this fantasy cop, I certainly would have had a heart attack in my sleep.

I don’t know if I will ever write this into a story. But, I told my youngest son the other night, “Look, if I have a heart attack in my sleep and end up on life support, don’t pull the plug right away. At least give me a week at the beach with that babe.”

If you want to be able to right horrific scenes with an edgy feel, do yourself a favor and write down your worst dreams when you wake.