What Dreams Won’t Come
My father was the horror and science fiction writer Richard Matheson. He wrote many books and movies, among the best known being I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man. He wrote several classic Twilight Zone episodes, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (also known as “the one with William Shatner and the thing on the wing”). He wrote Steven Spielberg’s first movie, Duel, the famous “Enemy Within” episode of Star Trek, and the time-travel love story Somewhere in Time. Dad was a very accomplished and gifted writer. He was also in many ways a wonderful father.
An early memory: I’m three years old and our family is at Disneyland. Dad and I are walking through some sets from the 1961 movie Babes in Toyland, which have been placed in the Opera House on Main Street. (“Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” would later fill the space.) These sets are tremendously exciting to me; to enter into the world of this movie which I love so much, to enter into the main character Tom’s life, to be near his beautiful girlfriend Mary — it’s all thrilling. It’s also terrifying, however, because one of the sets is the dark and foreboding “Forest of No Return.” I want to go through the forest very much, but I’m quite frightened of it. So I simply stand at the edge of the forest for a long time, unable to go in, but definitely not wanting to leave either. I just stay there, immobilized. And Dad waits with me. He’s at Disneyland, a place he likes a lot. (He and Mom first went there not long after it opened in 1955; they also, hilariously, went to Knott’s Berry Farm on their honeymoon. Much later, Dad admired the “Haunted Mansion”; he always said that the giant ballroom filled with waltzing ghosts was the most interesting and beautiful thing in the park.) But while the rest of the family is having fun going on rides, Dad stands with his wavering and unsure three-year-old son at the edge of the “Forest of No Return” for at least an hour.
Another early memory: I’m four. Mom is sick in bed and I’m going out somewhere with Dad (to a movie possibly?). I feel happy and excited about that. I always felt happy and excited about being with Dad. If he was going to the market or the post office or the hardware store or wherever, I wanted to go with him. I loved him and wanted to be like him. I thought he was the best father ever. I was never close with my mother. Suffice to say, we didn’t click. I didn’t click with my three older siblings either. Dad was pretty much it for me. But Dad was enough. He was the one I wanted and needed.
On summer camping trips, when we’d leave our house in the middle of the night to get an early start, Mom and my siblings would climb into sleeping bags in the back of our Chevy camper and crash. I alone would sit upfront with Dad, talking as we drove north through the middle of the night up Highway 101. We’d talk for hours, easily. Sometimes we’d talk about baseball, specifically the Dodgers, who we both loved. (Dad had loved them since he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn.) Dad always liked players he considered “canny” — not necessarily the most physically gifted ones, but the cleverest. In the late 1960s, that was Claude Osteen and Maury Wills; in the 1970s, it was Tommy John and Dusty Baker. Other times Dad would tell me scary ideas he had for stories. I remember one night speeding along an empty highway and Dad casually saying, “Wouldn’t it be strange if we looked out the window and saw a man running alongside the camper right now, staring in at us?” It gave me the chills at the time; honestly, it’s still creepy fifty years later.
When I was sixteen years old, Dad announced that he was planning on living to be 257 years old. Where exactly this notion and precise number had come from I had no idea at the time. From my standpoint, Dad just suddenly started talking about how he was going to live to be 257 years old. He didn’t really do anything to achieve this longevity. He didn’t exercise more or eat better or anything really. What he did do was purchase a tent-like “pyramid” (in reality, a cheap metal framework covered with a thin plastic sheet) and occasionally lay inside it on the living room floor for 15–20 minutes, presumably deriving “pyramid power” from it.
Some obvious realities in my family when I was growing up: people could communicate psychically; we had all lived before, numerous times; ghosts, spirits, poltergeists, and haunted houses were absolutely real; you could communicate with the dead by holding a seance. Also: There was a thin silver cord that connected your body to your soul. You might stretch this cord if you astral projected, but the silver cord would not actually break until you died. At that point your soul would float up out of your body and gaze down at your dying self.
As a kid, I knew what “ectoplasm” was. I accepted that, yes, psychics actually did sometimes manifest this viscous substance from their noses or mouths, and it sometimes did take on the appearance of a human being. I remember asking Dad about it.
“Is ectoplasm a real thing, Dad?”
“Oh sure, ectoplasm is absolutely real.”
“Stuff that comes out of a psychic’s nose during a seance, like snot or something?”
“No, no, it’s not like snot. It’s more its own thing.”
“And it can actually take the shape of a dead person?”
“Oh sure.”
“Which can then be spoken to?”
“Yeah.”
“And sometimes it speaks back?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“And this is real, Dad?”
“It’s completely real, I’ve seen lots of evidence.”
When I was a kid, if there was a pounding on a wall, that wasn’t the house settling or the plumbing making a noise. No, that was a spirit, and probably an angry one too. If a parked car’s window was mysteriously “missing,” that wasn’t because it had been rolled down at some point but because a poltergeist had taken it. If a light suddenly popped on in a closet, that was most likely the sign of a ghostly presence.
One of the magazines that was always lying around the house when I was a kid was Fate: True Stories of the Strange and Unknown. Here are some articles from the late sixties and early seventies when I was growing up: “Did Humans Tame Dinosuars?,” “Sex in the Spirit World,” “Are Marriages Made in Heaven?,” “How to Run Your Home Seance,” “How to Resist Alien Abduction,” “My Personal Banshee,” “Message from the Sobbing Ghost,” “How to Fight Demon Possession,” “Battle of the Ghosts,” “My Grandmother the Ghost,” “ESP Revives Dead Plant,” “Cats Go to Heaven,” “How to Make a Magic Mirror,” and “Astral Projection a Risky Process.”
And the thing is — none of this stuff felt good to me. From the start, it felt weird, made-up, sickly in some way I couldn’t have put into words at the time. I didn’t exactly “disbelieve” yet. I didn’t know enough for that. I didn’t know much of anything, but I definitely knew that I disliked this stuff. I remember sometimes lying in my bed at night, turning on a little transistor radio and pressing it close to my ear, listening to the local news station and finding there was something extremely comforting about the fact that there was a real world out there, with real things happening in it. It wasn’t all hidden and scary and bizarre.
I went to lots of bookstores with Dad when I was growing up. (He loved them, as I would assume all writers do.) I’d always drift to the sports section and happily look at baseball books. There was one bookstore I definitely did not like, though: the Bodhi Tree, the famous New Age bookstore off Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. I didn’t like the Bodhi Tree for three reasons: (1) it carried no baseball books; (2) the sound and smell and overall feel of it, the tinkly music and incense, all seemed icky and fake to me; and (3) Dad would occasionally be recognized by some alarming person who would stand too close to him and talk too loud and seem desperate and needy. There was one man in particular—his name was “Bongo”—whom I remember finding especially weird. Bongo wore vampire teeth that his dentist father had made for him, and he chomped them broadly while talking overexcitedly to Dad.
Dad wrote messages to himself on index cards: “Everything I do succeeds.” “Every year I grow more successful.” “I am increasingly calm, confident, and happy.” He would write these commands to himself ten times on 3x5 index cards, then put the cards in his bedside drawer. Even though I more or less idolized Dad, there was something about those little index cards that made me uneasy. Why was Dad trying to talk himself into being confident? Was he not actually confident?
The idea for the cards came from Dad’s “success therapist,” a man named Champion Teutsch. (I later went to see Dr. Teutsch on Dad’s recommendation. I mainly just stared at his extremely buffed fingernails and his thick, chunky gold rings. I never went back.) Teutsch was a legitish scholar who made wildly overblown claims and thus came across as a charlatan.
He claimed to have modified the genetic code, for instance. In 1977 Dad wrote What Dreams May Come, a highly autobiographical novel about life after death. In the book, Dad’s character, “Chris,” dies in a car accident and, after a bit of time spent on Earth as a ghost, goes to heaven. Mom, unable to live without Dad, kills herself and, for that sin, is sent to hell. Dad travels to hell to save Mom and at the very last moment does so. As I read the book, I remember being thrown by it. Dad dies and goes to heaven, but Mom dies and goes to hell? “Why is that the story, Dad?” I remember asking him. “What else could it be?” “I don’t know, maybe it could be flipped, like Mom could go to heaven and you could go to hell and then you’d have to escape hell to get to her, something like that?” “Oh no, that would make no sense at all.” Dad sending himself to heaven and Mom to hell was definitely weird, I felt. (As was the fact that all us kids were left orphans in the book and Dad didn’t even really acknowledge that—“they’ll be fine,” the book more or less shrugs.)
As I got older, Dad’s New Age beliefs started to look increasingly implausible to me. Astrology would have been one of the first things I doubted because, well, the readings were all about me, and I didn’t think what my Dad’s astrologer “Franka” (who looked exactly the way you’d think she’d look) said about me described me very accurately. It mainly seemed like a bunch of overbroad generalizations that would basically be true of more or less anyone. Also, I started to wonder, why exactly would the location of the planets have any affect on my, or anyone else’s, personality?
At first I didn’t get into it with Dad. It simply wasn’t worth it. If he found the fact that we were both Pisces meaningful, well, through my mid-twenties I saw no reason to disagree with him. Even though his beliefs didn’t make much sense to me, I was close with Dad and that still felt good.
But the doubts were steadily growing. About life after death, for instance. Why would there even be such a thing, I started to wonder. What possible purpose could it serve? Even more incomprehensible to me was the idea of ghosts. Why the hell would they exist? For what conceivable reason would the spirits of the dead continue to exist, floating around and scaring people? Supposedly, spirits were everywhere, but I never saw one. That’s how it was, Dad explained; spirits never manifested to skeptics. Why?
Because skepticism and disbelief interfered with their energy. Even daylight was harmful to the “finer matter” of spiritual emanations, it turned out. That’s why they mainly appeared in dark rooms. Spirits, Dad explained to me, appeared only to those who already believed in them. “But if this stuff was actually real, wouldn’t they appear to everyone, Dad?”
“Not to skeptics, no.”
“But if it was true wouldn’t skeptics be convinced?”
“No, because they don’t want to be convinced.”
I thought this was laughable.
I won’t lie; I had a motivation to laugh at these things. They had always upset me. I’d never liked them, never found them fun or exciting. Rather, I’d found them worrisome from the start. When I could laugh about them, it seemed to shrink them, put them in perspective. I was always a very anxious kid, always nervous about one thing or another. At some point (and I wish I could remember the exact moment but I can’t) I discovered that when I laughed at things, I felt less scared of them. That of course made me want to laugh at things as much as possible. I wanted to watch funny things, read funny things, and, as I got older, try to make funny things.
In 1986, when I was twenty-seven years old, I got in a car accident. It wasn’t a major accident, not at all, but my head did hit the windshield, causing me to see “stars.” I was quickly released from the emergency hospital because I felt fine, but in the aftermath of the accident, I started to feel . . . strange—more emotional, more easily upset, and far more anxious. I began to have panic attacks for the first time in my life. I sometimes hyperventilated until I thought I was going to pass out. I felt I was a failure and a loser and I kind of hated myself.
I felt a powerful need to get away from people, to be alone, to lick my wounds, I suppose. Among those I pulled away from at this time was Dad.
I would have thought beforehand—or certainly hoped anyway—that Dad would understand what I was doing. After all, he’d left his family behind in 1951 at the age of twenty-five and pretty much never looked back. I thought he’d get it. But I think my pulling away must have hurt his feelings, and I can see now how it could have. I’d always looked up to Dad and wanted to be as close to him as I possibly could. Now I wanted distance from him.
But as Dad got upset with me for needing space, well, predictably, that only made me need more space, which seemed to bother Dad even more. A quick downward cycle resulted, which did a tremendous amount of damage to our relationship in a very short amount of time.
The car accident did something else too. It made me, for the first time, start to get interested in religion. I’d had no interest up to the age of twenty-seven. I’d quite literally never set foot in a church of any kind. Now, feeling confused and worried, having apparently “shaken something loose” in my head, I started to look for “meaning.”
I started to go into churches, and I instantly found them intriguing, different from anyplace else I’d ever been. I was affected by the deep meanings embedded in pretty much everything I looked at. “This is fascinating,” I remember thinking to myself. “I definitely need to learn more about this.” A few months later, I read the Bible for the first time.
This reading did not, I found, enhance my estimation of Dad’s New Age beliefs. I didn’t find myself thinking Christianity was “true,” not at all, but I did think it was beautiful in a way and had obviously inspired a lot of magnificent art. Dad’s New Age stuff looked puny and overblown to me by comparison.
Dad wanted me to believe what he believed, to go along with his story. I had always been his boy, his greatest admirer, his true believer. Now I started to turn on him, disagree with him, even make fun of his beliefs.
“Why do you not believe?” Dad started to demand of me. “What’s wrong with you that you don’t believe?” is what I was pretty sure he meant. “What’s wrong with you that you do believe?” I started more or less responding. Our conversations, historically so effortless and enjoyable, started to grow tense. I didn’t like Dad’s worldview. I thought his ideas were stunted and fear-based. He thought I was angry and destructive. We both thought we were right, pretty much knew we were right. Dad sometimes blamed my astrological chart. I’m an “Aries rising,” which to Dad explained my irascible, contentious nature. If Dad wanted to let me off the hook in years to come, in fact, or end an argument, he would attribute my skepticism to my chart. “It must be very difficult to be an Aries rising.”
Growing up, all through my teens and into my twenties, I’d always felt that Dad believed in me. “Things come easily for you, Chris,” he had often said. That wasn’t true—things didn’t come easily for me, not at all, but I liked hearing it, it always gave me a bit of confidence. Dad believed in me and that counted for a lot. By the time I was thirty, though, Dad’s refrain had changed. It was no longer, “Things come easily for you, Chris,” but rather, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Chris.” Which, honestly, I didn’t. I made tons of mistakes of many different kinds, but hearing Dad’s grim “I hope you know what you’re doing,” well, it never helped.
I didn’t look at Dad the same way anymore and that caused him to not look at me the same way anymore. He became more critical of me as I became more critical of him.
At a certain point I felt like Dad’s ability to be a father to me just sort of ran out. He couldn’t be, or maybe didn’t want to be, a father to a doubting, skeptical young man who didn’t buy his ideas and didn’t seem to want to either. Had Dad ever actually believed in me? I began to wonder. Or had he only believed in me because I believed in him?
This essay is adapted from Conversations with the Father: A Memoir about Richard Matheson, My Dad and God, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Chris Matheson is a screenwriter whose credits include the Bill and Ted movies and Rapture-Palooza and an author of multiple books, including The Story of God: A Biblical Comedy about Love (and Hate). He lives in Portland, Oregon.
July 2024