Did You Know Stephen King Recycles His Time Travel Characters? #ElevenDaysOfSpookySeason

By notoriouslysinglegirl, October 26, 2024

Fiction is the truth inside of a lie. The most important things are the hardest to say.

Stephen King

Last year, around this time I was reading 11/22/63, A time travel novel written by Stephen King about a guy who goes through a pantry and shows up in the year 1963 and tries to stop the Kennedy assassination. There’s a character in the novel who sits at the exit of the the pantry. He’s a vagrant alcoholic black man that seems to be belligerent. He’s the guardian at the threshold that warns the protagonist about going into 11/22/63. The vagrant alcoholic character is literally stuck at the threshold in between two timelines. Towards the end of the 900 page novel, we find out that the vagrant alcoholic went back in time to try and stop the death of his child.

Coincidentally, this year same time as last year, I started reading Rose Madder, also written by Stephen King. The book is a pseudo time-travel novel about a woman named Rose who escapes her abusive police officer husband and ends up in a hotel for women. Rose goes to a thrift store buys a painting of a woman wearing a red chiton who seems to be around greek ruins. The type of red coloring that the woman’s chiton is made from is called Madder. And the woman in the painting is named Rose same as the protagonist.

As Rose hangs the painting on the wall she feels that the painting is calling to her. She starts to have psychic dreams about her psychopathic abusive husband. She can hear and see his thoughts in her dreams. The psychopathic husband can also see and hear Rose’s thoughts and actions in his dreams. They have a sort of telepathic type communication.

Rose suddenly enters the painting as if she’s in her dream. She meets a black woman, who seems to be quite aggressive and acts as a sort of guide telling Rose that she needs to go into the labyrinth in the painting to save Rose Madder’s baby from Erinys the Minotaur.

Recycled Characters

The two threshold guardians in 11/22/63 and Rose Madder seem to be the same character in two different bodies. They have the same ethnic background, they are both threshold guardians, all though one is a belligerent drunk, the other seems to be aggressive and demanding. Could Stephen King just be recycling these type of characters like a sort of AI or build a character type bot and giving them close to the same storyline, although changing their gender?

Alcohol & Writing

Stephen King had a substance abuse problem with alcohol and after he published his book The Dark Half he stopped drinking. Technically, he was sober when he wrote Rose Madder in 1998 and 11/22/63 in 2011. However, in his novels, his characters have nonsensical conversations that go on for what seems like hundred’s of pages. Technically, real people don’t speak this way, only the characters in Stephen King’s head have these types of conversations that quite possibly evolved from a train of consciousness.

And it’s also possible that he recast the same threshold character in Rose Madder and made her a man in 11/22/63.

Who do these characters represent? Perhaps they are a reflection of King’s past dark drunken self. That self that kept creating chaos in his personal life. In his novels, he recreates this persona of himself as a threshold guardian or sorts going into the past and warning the characters to be “conscious “ of the path they are embarking on and to proceed with “intent.”

The Painting & The Labyrinth

There are never any coincidences.

The only reason why I chose to read Rose Madder this year was because I found the book in a library a few weeks ago. I had been casually searching for it since 2020 when the book came to me through a 4th dimensional download after I was dating a guy who was stuck in a proverbial labyrinth of sorts. He literally sent me a picture of himself in a labyrinth one day after I felt that he was sending me subliminal psychic messages.

I remember I had strange crying fits while I was on a walk in Silver Lake. I passed it off as peri menopause symptoms, but the odd thing was that visions of him in a rage entered my subconscious.

I was writing him a letter after my walk when suddenly I got a text message from him, the text was a picture of a painting he made. I told him I didn’t want to speak to him until he got my letter in the mail. And then something peculiar happened.

I hadn’t heard from the guy I was dating for 3 days. Until that evening around 7pm pst when he sent me a picture of a painting of a voluptuous naked woman. I asked him why he was sending me a painting of a “fat woman” he responded “don’t call my painting fat!”

I then asked him what he was doing earlier in the day. I told him about my telepathic visions and he sent me the picture of himself in the labyrinth somewhere in the Hollywood hills. Even though the picture was him, he looked different. As if he was some other different character. His hair was a bit messy and his facial expression was empty and almost hollow. Like he was still the same person only playing a different character.

I went to my bedroom at about 11pm pst after I finished writing the letter. I stood in front of my my mirrored closet and took off my clothes . I suddenly looked in the mirror and noticed that I had taken the same pose as the woman in the painting. My curves were exactly the same as the curves of the woman in the painting.

The next day I texted the guy I was dating and said “I know who the woman in the painting is!”

“Who is it?” He texted back.

“It’s me!” I replied.

Astral Travel

The next day I went to his house. He showed me the painting. I asked him how did he paint me in the future?

“I astral traveled and saw this curvey naked woman in my mind and I began to paint her. I wanted to capture her curves!”

He would have had to paint the painting several weeks prior. And from his Instagram the painting had evolved from a drawing into a painting encompassing a variety of different backgrounds.

The painting was painted from the perspective of how I saw myself. He painted the painting from my personal view point. It was an incredibly fascinating phenomenon how he captured an evolution that had not happened yet in real time.

And that’s when the downloads started to come in like a crazy waterfall at the top of my 8th chakra. Downloads that took me through Wikipedia rabbit holes giving me answers to a future story that stood stuck in time unresolved.

The downloads came in the form of several books. One science fiction book called Galileo’s Dream by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, another voluminous novel of 900 pages that came to me from a library in Virginia. The book is about Galileo trapped in a prison in Florence by the pope for being a heretic. Galileo starts to have temporal seizures where he time travels and meets people from the future on the Galilean Moons where there’s an apocalypse about to happen. Through out the novel Galileo travels both to his past and into the future manipulating time and fixing his errors in life. It’s kinda like that show Being Erica where the protagonist has many regrets in her life, starts to see a therapist who actually is a guide who helps her to travel back in time to change the past. It’s reminiscent of Dantes Divine comedy where the poet Dante travels through his own personal hell with the poet Virgil to conquer his demons.

Are We Two People Living One Life or Are We Time Travelers ?

So what’s really going on here? Are we two people sharing one soul? Or are we timetravlers colliding in between collapsing timelines?

Are we using one soul and living life through two different avatars much like Stephen Kings characters in 11/22/63 and Rose Madder: same character recycled in two different stories?

Let’s Ask The Fates & The Furies

In Rose Madder, Erinys is a Minotaur stuck in a labyrinth holding a baby hostage. The baby that Rose must save for Rose Madder, the woman wearing the madder chiton. The baby that Rose must save is technically the soul of her daughter she miscarried several years prior.

In Greek myth, the Erinys are chthonic goddesses of vengeance also known as “the Furies.” The furies take vengeance on men who swore a false oath. Walter Burkett suggests that they are an embodiment of an act of self cursing contained in the oath.

The Fates are the personification of destiny. Their role is to ensure that every human lives out their destiny as it was assigned to them here on earth. Destiny is represented as a thread spun on a spindle. And much like in the story of Sleeping Beauty, where Aurora meets with an old hag spinning wool into thread on a spinning wheel or a whorl. Curious, Aurora touches the needle and pricks her finger sending her into a deep hypnotic trance like sleep state unable to fulfill her true destiny and throwing her off her “pre-destined” path.

In Roman myths the fates are seen as oracles and in Greek myth they take rank above the gods. In Nordic myth the fates are seen as witches who arrive at the birth of the hero in order to shape his or her destiny. and in the story of Sleeping Beauty three fairies arrive at the birth of Princess Aurora, whom they change her name to “Rose.”

Can we, like the protagonist in 11/22/63 actually go back in time to change past events that will then reroute our destiny?

We’ll have to explore that in another blog post in the future about “Time Travel.” Stay tuned!