"What Dreams May Come" (1988)

I like this story by Brad Strickland quite a bit. I thought of Robert Aickman, who often turns to the dream aether and is not above carnival settings either. The story trucks in a lot of tried and true elements of dreamland that often devolve into cliché. Why did this one work on me? Is it really a matter of mood? I don't think so, but that's one of those general things I would like to figure out. A man is standing at a roller-coaster ride waiting for his daughter and her friend. Another man approaches him and they have a bizarre conversation. "Do you dream?" the strange man says. "Dream of pleasant things?" The father has a compulsion to talk to him about dreams. They talk briefly and it feels portentous, especially when the stranger touches him, taking his shoulder briefly. The father appears to be divorced, or separated from his wife, though they are both still involved as parents. Then it's August, the following month, when the father's terrible dreams begin. In the dream he finds himself committing a despicable crime. The next day he feels sick when he learns the friend of his daughter at the roller-coaster has been murdered in her bed by an intruder. The crime sounds like his dream, but he was in another city at the time. It couldn't have been him. And so it goes. He keeps having bad dreams and they keep happening in real life and it's always impossible for him to have done them. A lot of stuff is handled just right in this story, such as the touch on the shoulder in the original encounter. In a careful throwaway aside, we learn the man who touched him probably committed suicide some time after. Thus the horrible way forward appears to be that you can pass the curse on to another, but you're never entirely free of it psychologically, something like the ruling conceit in the movie It Follows. I love how simple this story is: bad dreams. That's it. Yet so dreadful are they that the only rational response may be suicide. In the haunted father's interior dialogue, he imagines he is responsible for the murders even though it is impossible. He imagines it is a demon inside him that escapes at night. That might be it too, but the genius of this story is that it really doesn't matter what it is. Simply that it exists, whatever it is, is the terrible thing.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Story not available online.