The Power of Atep: Part 1

Writer Victor Pemberton was something of an Egyptologist himself and said the idea of a shared dream is not as improbable as it sounds: "I was doing a radio serial about the Valley of the Kings, and my producer, a friend and myself spent a very restless night in a hotel just outside the Valley. In the morning we discovered that we'd all been dreaming about a rather obscure pharaoh who'd been dead about 4000 years". The dolls which evil John Pentacle uses in the story are chalk statuettes which Pemberton brought back from Egypt: "Admittedly, they're imitations, reproductions made by the Arabs," he said, "but Atep in the story is based on a couple of real 18th Dynasty High Priests who used dolls just like these to hypnotise their victims".