Bridle for a Nightmare

Fanfiction
Title:	Bridle for a Nightmare
Author(s):	Elizabeth Clair
Date(s):	1977
Length:
Genre(s):	het
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS
Relationship(s):
External Links:	art for this story by Leslie Fish
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Bridle for a Nightmare is a het Star Trek: TOS story by Elizabeth Clair. It is the sequel to Bitter Dreams.

It was published in the print zine Obsc'zine #2. Leslie Fish was the artist for this story.

Note: The prequel to this story was written by Catherine Clair. It is unclear if the difference in names is a typo, an active decision, or actually two different people.

Summary

"McCoy has accidentally caused the death of the Lamia. Kirk and Spock, not realizing how the Lamia was torturing McCoy, conduct a hearing on the doctor's responsibility for her death. McCoy is cleared uhen the facts are revealed, but is still haunted by his experience. An old friend, psychiatrist Beatrice Kouaiski, is serving on the Enterprise and she uses unique methods to reach out to McCoy and effect a cure."

Reactions and Reviews

'Bridle for a Nightmare' was an exceptionally powerful sequel to her Bones horror story in the previous issue. A strong beginning helps make up for a rather weak ending. Nice characterizations, nice plotting, nice scientific and historical details, nice writing.

"Bridle for a Nightmare", is an interesting tale wherein McCoy inadvertantly discovers the way (a kiss) to open a stasis field discovered by the Enterprise, and thereby releases the Lamia. The female creature controls him and tortures him, bringing horrible perverted dreams of sex and death. Eventually, he accidentally kills the creature. Ignorant of what has been going on, Kirk and Spock conduct a hearing on McCoy's responsibility for the murder, and "Bridle..." rather confusingly begins with his testimony at this hearing. He is, of course, exonerated, but he still is badly disturbed, has trauma neuroses, terrible nightmares, and is afraid of sex and of women. But a friendly colleague, a psychiatrist named Beatrice, helps him recreate and reshape his dream experiences with the aid of a special tricorder she calls a "dream shaper". She helps him through the violent and painful dreams, leading him to considered, positive action, letting him control his own dream-experiences, then helps him return to sexual experience—with herself. He is finally able to sleep dreamlessly and is cured.

Elizabeth Clair's "Bridle for a Nightmare", a sequel to "Bitter Dreams", is clearly the zine's best of- fering. It is smoothly written and well-characterized; the lady doctor who helps McCoy over his trauma is definitely not a Mary Sue.

McCoy has (inadvertently) killed an alien; in the hearing, he reveals that she had been giving him gruesome but erotic nightmares in which he dies after or during sex with her. He is acquitted but can’t get rid of the nightmares until a female colleague forces him into therapy under a hypno-gizmo that projects the dreams so that he can change them. Dream 1: he rescues a drowning woman who then kills him; this time he kills her instead - and wakes having ejaculated and worried about seeing himself as a sex-killer. Dream 2: he is lured into sex on a sacrificial altar and she cuts his heart out; he manages to break the knife, then rapes her, waking to another orgasm and now disturbed that he has these rape fantasies. Dream 3: a harem girl lures him to bed then cuts his head off when the sultan comes back; this time he escapes to safety on a horse, taking her with him, and he ends it by making tender and skillful love to her, achieving his cure. On waking he realizes that he was in fact fondling the therapist; they decide to “try for four.” Well-written, with more plot than most adult Trek stories - suspenseful, witty and kinda sweet.