More than Magic - Page 5


And here's one of my favorites: another 8-year-old boy, James, couldn't sleep. When he did, he had terrible nightmares about Freddy Krueger, the murderous character in the slasher movie Nightmare on Elm Street. In James's dreams, Freddie would murder his parents and then come to kill him.

The boy didn't seem to be that troubled, except for these nightmares. So what did the psychiatrist do? He rented the movie, researched it, and then wrote to Wes Craven, the author and director. Surprisingly, Craven wrote back a long letter detailing his terrible childhood and the scary fights between his parents. His artistic oeuvre had been the result.

The good doctor showed the letter to James, and as he read it aloud, "James almost puffed up to the size of a comfortable boy." In the follow-up commentary, we're told that "on the few later occasions that James's nightmares returned, his parents cut the cycle short by again reading to him from Mr. Craven's letter." Is it too late for me to write a favorite novelist or moviemaker—Francis Ford Coppola or Saul Bellow? (Unfortunately, he's dead).

It's easy to make fun of some of these vignettes (I just have). I suspect I'm not getting the whole story from Terr's contributing psychiatrists. Or because of my temperament and therapeutic history, the entire idea of what constitutes a magical moment of change is just too good for me to believe.

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