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An Inspiring Animation of Stephen King Talking About the Power of Dreams

King's creepiest characters get together to explain the relationship between fear, childhood, and dreams.
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Stephen King's expertise on fear is nearly unmatched. In a new Blank on Blank, animated by Patrick Smith, the author who made pop-culture weird drops wisdom about fear's relationship to both childhood and dreams.

King says the reason we associate childhood with fear has a lot to do with how we see the world as adults. "We think in a different way as children. We tend to think around corners instead of in straight lines. Sometimes for a kid the shortest distance between two points isn't a straight line. That's the way that we think in dreams," he says in a 1989 interview with WAMC Northeast's Public Radio Book Club.

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In another scene he talks about seeing a young girl talking to herself and drawing in the dirt with a stick. "If I did that, somebody would come along and say, 'There's a grown man sitting in the dirt talking to himself and people who aren't there, and drawing with a stick,' which is very close to what I do for a living, what people pay me to do."

The art world has been building on similar observations to King's about the relationship between childhood, dreams, and creativity for decades. It's observable in the Surrealist obsessession with the subconcious in the early to mid-1900s, and the Fauvists' devotion to childlike emotional expression before that. King's words are a reminder that dream symbolism, fear, and the unknown are a great place to start when building your own creative empire. Watch the full animated interview below.

See more of Blank on Blank's animated interviews here.

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