Waking Nightmare

It was on this day in 1818 that Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was published.

Two years before she had spent the summer in a cabin on Lake Geneva with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, her sister Claire, and Claire's lover, the poet Lord Byron. It rained a lot that summer, and one night, Byron suggested they all write ghost stories. At first Mary had trouble coming up with a story, but while lying in bed, claimed to have a waking nightmare, seeing a vision of a man reanimating a creature. She wrote: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion." So she set to work on Frankenstein.
-Writers Almanac