Dream of: 25 August 1995 "Silence Of The Lambs"

I was in a hotel room in New York City where I had been staying for two weeks. I walked to the window, opened it and looked outside at the other buildings. I was perhaps on the tenth floor. It certainly felt good to be in New York. I knew this was where I needed to be if I was going to make it as a writer. This was where the action was.

I shut the window and turned back to my room. It was nothing fancy, but more than adequate. I figured it was costing me about $60 a day. That meant that I was spending about $6,000 a month to stay here. That was a lot of money, but I knew I had enough to live for a long time, well over a year. The main thing was that I had to write and sell something within that time.

I pondered what I would write. I knew I had to write and sell something rather fast, and I thought it was possible to publish a book very quickly. Books written on hot, current topics were often put together very hastily and published. But what kind of book was I going to write? As I thought about it, I visualized a man sitting in a chair in front of me a few meters away. I quickly realized this was the author of the book The Silence of the Lambs. I thought how the book had been well-written and straight forward. Yet it was a simple story and the author had probably been able to put it together quite quickly.

The author was in profile to me so I could only see the left side of his head. He was probably 50 years old and was completely bald. But what I most noticed was that his left ear was missing and the spot where the ear should have been was covered by a scar. I thought with his ear missing it would be easier to put a black leather mask over his entire head. The black, leather mask seemed to me to be a critical part of his story.

As I continued to think of a story, I visualized another scene. In this scene a detective had gone to a prison to interview an inmate. Both the detective and the inmate were seated facing each other in a small interview room. The detective had black hair, was probably in his late fifties and somewhat resembled the actor Jerry Orbach. The inmate had thick black hair, was thin, and probably in his late 30s. He looked as if he might be Italian.

The detective told the inmate that he could invoke his rights and not speak to him. The detective then went on to say that someone was trying to pin a grizzly crime on the inmate. The inmate immediately maintained that he hadn't committed any such crime, and seemed to show a willingness to cooperate. Watching the scene, I also had the feeling the inmate was innocent. But obviously he had a serious problem here.