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Author’s Note –
‘The Dreamcatcher’
I began
writing ‘The Dreamcatcher’ purely to exorcise my
writing demons, but as it progressed, I began to realise the potential
symbolism it had in store, and I sought to expand on that. The whole idea of
‘The Dreamcatcher’ is that fear is a part of us, a
part of every living thing. What relevance this has to the girls being crushed,
hanged, beaten and having all sorts of nasty things done to them, I don’t know,
but the idea of them not destroying the demon that pursues them is relevant to
the entire human race. For a man’s psyche is divided, in my opinion, into many
different parts, one of which is fear. It’s like the character of Buddy Love in
The Nutty Professor. Take it away,
and a person is weaker, not stronger, because they are now incomplete. Fear is
what allows us to tell the difference between what is safe and what isn’t,
between what’s right and wrong. Fear can kill us, but it is also what keeps us
alive, and tells us instinctively to keep away from anything perceived by us to
be dangerous. I, for example, am slightly afraid of spiders. This would save my
life if I were to come across, say, a funnel-webbed spider, which can kill, in
the Australian undergrowth.
In retrospect, I guess that the
girls’ gruesome ordeals are an embodiment of the fact that fear has an iron
grip on us, an astral leech that will not let go until you die. Because, once
you die, you have nothing to fear. But letting your fears get a hold of you can
lead to your downfall, and it has its wicked effect on the girls. The demon
thrives on their fears, and their escalating force results from the girls
providing him with more and more power. This is what fear does to you if you
let it get out of control. It will rise and take over your body like a debilitating
disease, and it will not let go until you face up to them. The girls, however,
do not realise this at the beginning of the story, so the evil, sadistic power
of the demon is simply of a representation of the ruthless, sadistic bastard
that is FEAR. It, like the demon, gets kicks from watching them squirm in
torment, as Abraham McKenzie later explains to them. In fact, I think that
McKenzie summarises it best : ‘This guy[’s]…thrivin’ on your fears. You
take that fear away from him, and he don’t got nothin’ to work with.’ i.e., Don’t try to erase fear
from your body, because you won’t be able to accomplish it. Merely try to give
the fear in you as little room as possible to manoeuvre, and you’ll get
through.
Don’t let fear hold
you back, but don’t let it push you forward, either. As it says at the very
beginning of the story, ‘Nothing can hurt
you unless you give it the power to do so.’
- Hugo Fagandini, Thursday 6th
March 2003