Ever wake up at 3 AM, lying on your bed and staring at the ceiling wondering whether that strange dream you had was just a consequence of your imagination or not? We’ve all been there. The difference between the security of our reality and the strange world of dreams can be very thin. But what if that line gets thinner, and your midnight thoughts begin to develop a life of their own? Picture a diner suffused in the purulent light of a distant neon sign, where the waitress is just a bit too eager to tell you the “house special.” Somewhere where the food offerings are more about a weird form of psychological examination. That makes you wonder, what’s on the menu tonight – and better still, what’s on your mind? Are you in control, or are you simply a puppet in the theater of your subconscious? The mind is a bizarre and amazing thing, able to make worlds in our imagination far greater than the most fanciful ones. And it’s a dark and mysterious place where fears and anxieties can play themselves out in very frightening ways. Dreams may be a door to that darkness, a glimpse over the curtain of our aware minds. And what we may find there may be very unsettling indeed. As Salvador Dalí once said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” Perhaps the line between madness and sanity is narrower than we believe. Perhaps those surreal, scary dreams are merely a glance at the real nature of existence. If you like wandering through the creepy crossroads of dreams and reality, you may enjoy James Konrath’s book OINK. It ventures into a domain where the strange and the terrifying lurk around every corner.