The Beginning of Eracsia

Alexander Joem — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the longest time, I never bothered with writing down my dreams. Quite unlike most people, many of my dreams didn't always slip away the second I woke up. And although there are a few that have stayed with me since I was a kid, I just never thought they'd ever serve any purpose beyond being unsettling recollections.

That is, until I had the dream that would become The Lady with the Baby.

There was just something about that dream that I couldn't quite shake. I wrote it all down on a piece of paper immediately, the man meeting the red-headed single mother, the race, the basin-headed statue, before I'd even fully processed what I'd just seen. The strangest thing about this dream was that it felt like I was witnessing a real event. I know it gets that with some dreams, but this was positively convincing. Halfway through it, I was lucid and could even see what was coming, but I had no control whatsoever over what I was witnessing.

After that dream, I began keeping a record, on and off, mostly in a Google Doc. I narrated some of these dreams to a few friends, and they acknowledged how unsettling they were. As for the source of these weird dreams, my best guess is that my years of consuming movies, novels, and comic books of the macabre sort had finally coalesced into a sort of Cenobite-esque labyrinth of stories deep within my psyche.

Some of the entries in what would become my dream journal are full accounts, written just after waking while everything was still sharp; for some, I could only scribble a premise, a fragment I couldn't make sense of yet and didn't want to lose entirely. And others, I'll admit, were left half-written, convinced that reading half of it later would be enough to bring the rest back. It wasn't, not always. And because of this, a number of the dreams I collected over the years are gone for good. Five of the most complete among these records were what made it into Bizarre Tales from Eracsia: Nightmares.

Some of the stories in this debut collection needed almost nothing added: a name here, a shape there, filling in a gap the dream had skipped past the way dreams do. One of them, I didn't touch at all. If you've read the book, you might already have a guess which one that is.

I never had any formal literary training, not in the traditional sense. What I did have, going back to my teens, was an unhealthy amount of time spent reading behind-the-scenes plot information for movies, video games, comic books, cartoons, anything and everything that intrigued me. How a script got rewritten before it reached the screen, what the original draft looked like, how a director ended up attached to something, or how an actor got cast. Before Wikipedia existed in any usable form, I was doing this with Microsoft Encarta and whatever else the internet had at the time. I even once tried to build my own dictionary of every Hollywood actor and every film they've been in. I did something similar with the first novel I ever fully read, Carnivore, tracing its author's inspiration back to real reporting on how nuclear waste was being stored, and then following that thread so far I ended up drafting an actual letter to NASA in 2007, proposing a fix, printed on my dad's Epson printer. He talked me out of sending it. I still have the printed copy. None of that taught me how to write a sentence well. But I think, in a way, it trained me on how to build a world and tie its pieces together, which turned out to matter more than I expected once I actually sat down to turn five dreams into five stories. That, plus something like two hundred paperbacks read over the years, is roughly the whole toolkit I brought into my journey as a writer.

This is pretty much the lore behind Bizarre Tales from Eracsia: Nightmares and my journey as an author. Eracsia has given me an outlet to share these unsettling dreams with the world, and I intend to keep doing so as long as they keep coming. The second book in the series is already taking shape.

If you've read Nightmares already, thank you for stepping into it. If you haven't yet, I hope you sleep less soundly once you have.

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Bizarre Tales from Eracsia #2 Coming Soon!!

Alexander Joem — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently working towards a late October release for the second book in Bizarre Tales from Eracsia series.

Working title - Bizarre Tales from Eracsia: Oculus.

Watch out!

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Alexander Joem | Updates

The Beginning of Eracsia

Bizarre Tales from Eracsia #2 Coming Soon!!