Dreams of Death and Other Things…

By Deirdre Swinden

There’s an old adage that claims if you die in your dreams you will die in real life. I have no recollection of how old I was when I first heard the edict. I had bad dreams quite often—nightmares where the road suddenly ended in the middle of the 17-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I could never stop the car in time to avoid a plummet into the icy waters below. But I would always wake before it hit. Always.

Still, the thought that one could die in real life simply because of a dream stuck with me. It worried me, hanging about like an anxious ghost each night before bed. And then one day, it happened.

I was deep in the midst of marital strife in my daily life, and that stress manifested itself in my dreams. On this particular night, I stood in the arms of my beloved, embraced in a passionate kiss. Before I could pull away, he raised a gun to the back of my head and shot us both.

And I died.

I was lucid enough to know what had happened—I had died in my dream. I could hear my last rattling breath and the silence that followed. Fortunately for me, my body resisted my brain’s directive and refused to die. Strangely enough, when I woke, I felt refreshed and revived, and resolved to move on from my troubles.

My marriage gasped its final breath shortly thereafter, but the idea for Somnium had been born, and I was itching to tell the tale. Still, there was work to be done before writing commenced. I embarked on a long and painful journey to learn why I had remained in a toxic marriage. I had to learn to forgive myself—for all the good and the bad of who I had become—before I could forge the woman I wanted to be.

In Somnium, Gillian embarks on a similar journey. She’s stuck in a nightmare, searching for a way out, preparing for death at every turn. To survive the night, she must face her fears and forgive, or she will never wake. I wrote Somnium to exorcise the nightmare of my unhappy marriage. And while the dreams of my youth still plague me from time to time, they no longer worry me.

After all, I have many other stories to tell.

Have you ever died in your sleep? If you’re alive to tell the tale, let us know what happened!

Somnium
by Deirdre Swinden

Immerse yourself in a terrifying blend of psychological horror and high-tech science fiction in this riveting novel where dreams can kill. Gillian Hardie experiences nightmares so intense they threaten her very existence, thanks to a glitch in Somnium Corporation’s groundbreaking dream advertising technology. Every night, her sleep unleashes monsters that her body reacts to as if they were real, pushing her to the edge of despair.

Armed with her lucid dreaming skills, Gillian battles these horrors, but when an accident traps her in a perpetual dream state, she must rely on Nathan Keller, a nightmare warrior, and Dex Cooper, an Operator, to navigate this nightmarish reality. With her darkest fears manifesting like never before, Gillian faces a race against time to survive a threat that could unleash unimaginable horrors from the depths of her mind.

 TRIGGER WARNINGS: This novel includes a brief depiction of sexual violence, gore and nightmare imagery.

Available on Amazon! 

About the Author: Deirdre Swinden

A successful writer/editor in the corporate world for more than two decades, Deirdre Swinden is currently living and writing in North Carolina. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Arcadia University and has published short stories in Griffel Literary Magazine and Grim & Gilded. Early in her writing career, she won the Popular Short Story Contest at the 2000 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference with her short work, “Shooting Televisions.”

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