My Inspiration for The Psychic Traveler Society series, goes back to a recurring theme in my dreams. Which is fitting for a story where people can travel through their daydreams.
*Note: Mild spoilers about the series’ first book, Healers and Thieves, ahead.
My Dream Houses
Like Amanda Jones, I have a tendency to dream about houses filled with doors. In her case, it’s daydreams about one Victorian home with doors that physically transport her to new worlds. For me, it’s nighttime dreams about different houses with doors that either stay closed or lead to strange places, like stairways with large gaps or a bridge overlooking a waterfall.
My dreams about houses aren’t every night, or even all that often, but they pop up from time to time. I’ve read some theories that houses are a common theme in dreams and may represents exploring aspects of the mind or the self. Of course, there are also a lot of conflicting theories on what dream houses and doors may mean, and it’s all subject to personal interpretation.
Before Psychic Travel
When I started working on Healers and Thieves, psychic travel wasn’t part of the story. My very first spark of inspiration came from a particular plant named oxalis triangularis (aka the love plant or purple shamrock). Oxalis triangularis is a nyctinastic plant, which is a fancy way of saying it opens with the sun and closes at night. As you can see in the video below.
While thinking about this plant, I imagined nyctinastic trees with spiral trunks that would reach to the sun during the day and spiral close to the the ground at night. Which you’ll likely recognize as the tuntum trees from Terra-V, the world Amanda visits in Healers and Thieves.
The tuntum trees look nothing like oxalis triangularis, though they are shades of purple and do have white flowers.
Imagining the tuntum trees led to creating a purple world and a girl from Earth who would unwittingly stumble in and stay for an adventure. Though I didn’t know how to get her to that world…
Travel by Dream House
I wrote quite a bit about the people who lived in the tuntum trees and thought I was creating a simple story about a fantastical world like Wonderland or Oz. There was a main character who didn’t make it into the finished book and a few supporting characters who did, but my main focus was on these sheltering trees. I even thought that whatever I was writing (a book? poem? short story?) might eventually be called The Sheltering Arms of the Tuntum Trees (which became the name of the story Amanda writes in chapter two).
As this other world became more real to me, I needed to find a way to bring Amanda there from our own world. Rabbit holes and tornadoes had already been done. I could have used a portal of some kind… or a door… Which made me think of the doors in my dream houses. As soon as I had that thought, the idea of psychic travel was born. And if Amanda could walk through doors in a daydream, there must be others with the same ability. Perhaps a secret society that operates in the shadows of our world, regularly traveling to alien places all linked through doors in a psychic dream house.
With that, the story expanded to a series where Amanda could develop her powers and explore more worlds as part of this secret society, all while navigating the ups and downs of a “normal” high school experience.
You can see how it all begins in Healers and Thieves and follow Amanda’s continuing story in the second book, Family and Foes. I’m currently writing the third book in the series, taking Amanda even further into her new world(s).