There’s almost always a single germ for
each of my novels. A moment, a line of poetry, a news story, a piece of junk
mail. What happens next is -- a bit odd. I start to hear a voice, or a couple
of voices. And these voices draw me through my narrative. I don’t have an
outline. I don’t know who is going to show up each day or what they are going
to do. And I certainly don’t know how the book is going to end.
For UNDER MY SKIN, it wasn’t a single
moment, as there often is. It was something.
Carl Jung wrote, a phrase that’s been
kicking around in my head for a while:
“Between
the dreams of day and night, there is not so great a difference.”
It’s a short sentence, but as with many
Jungian quotes there are layers of meaning here. The dreams of day and night –
what did he mean by this?
We spend an average of 229,000 hours
asleep during our lifetime. That’s more time than we spend eating, working, or driving
– more than a third of our lives sleeping and dreaming. Still we’re convinced
that our waking life is more real than whatever it is we’re experiencing when
we close our eyes at night.
Between those two worlds – the waking
and the dreaming worlds – is a doorway called hypnagogia. Maybe you haven’t heard that word before, but you’ve
definitely experienced it. It’s the threshold moment where we have those
bizarre dreams – we’re falling, or a bear leaps out from the shadows – and
we’re startled awake. This connection between the adjacent worlds of waking and
dreaming has been a point of wonder for me, as are other states where
perception is altered.
For example, while I was researching
another of my novels CRAZY LOVE YOU, I interviewed a clinical psychiatrist about
fugue states and black outs. I had always thought that black outs were the
result of repressed memory, or memories that got buried so deep that you no
longer have access to them. But he said
no. That black outs are ultimately a failure of cognition, that at a certain
point in intoxication, we stop taking information in altogether. Addiction
alters our perception of reality.
And then, of course, there’s trauma
–which is most certainly a brain event, as well as a psychological and
emotional one. And one I’ve explored in other novels. This too is a state where
our memory, our perception might be altered. I was speaking to a former Navy
Seal who works with veterans suffering from the after-effects of blast and
PTSD. And he talked about the spiral some of these soldiers find themselves in
– untreated PTSD, which can lead to sleep disruption, which can lead to
addiction, which unravels the support system of family and friends. In this
state, reality starts to unravel to devastating result.
So, it wasn’t one of these things, but
all of them I think that led me to start hearing the voice of Poppy Lang. In
her journey, I wanted to explore the way the psyche copes with grief and
trauma, the twin demons of addiction and sleep disruption, and how our own
perception and memories can be as slippery and unreliable as our dreams.
Under My Skin by Lisa Unger published
by HQ on 18th October 2018
Her
husband’s killer maybe closer than she thinks… It’s
been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his
morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still
haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed… Sleep deprived and
secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality.
She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s
actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he
said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…
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