I Am Completely Serious

Feeling that I was not already stressed-out enough, my subconscious last night provided me with an extremely vivid dream in which my job search was complicated by a natural disaster that made fossil fuel prices rise disastrously. The dream had very specific and plausible ideas about what effects this would have. This morning I kept finding myself on Google trying to research what the chemical makeup of the Aichi area’s soil was like, and what vegetables would grow best in it. You know, so I know what to plant if the grocery stores run out of food.

I finally turned off the computer and played Pokemon for a few hours, which had the desired zombifying effect.

Last night I dreamed I went through what I’ve read of Detective Loki, found that there were no scenes of Narugami without his shirt on, and came to the realization he had to be a cross-dressing girl. Because that’s the only possibility? This is what manga does to you.

And now I’m totally convinced that that would be awesome. It is not, however, going to happen. (Now that I’m thinking about it awake, I think he is shirtless for a second in the wedding story.)

In the middle of my dream about the Demon Kadon and her fight against the Evil Pope, as well as her interpersonal conflicts with fellow protagonists Princess Leddain and Templar Hagen, there was an interlude in which I went into the grocery store to get hot chocolate mix. Because I was nearly out. Reaching the appropriate aisle, I upon further consideration of the matter decided to buy straight cocoa powder instead, as I already had a large thing of sugar with which I wasn’t doing anything else, and because the cocoa would additionally be useful for making pudding.

This resolved, I went to check out, and the dream went back to Kadon and the pope. Except that now Zuko and Azula were there, as well as one of the evil women from Tactics (the one who spilled tea on her leg) and some monsters from Barbara Hambly’s Windrose Chronicles.

I suddenly remembered all this when I went to make hot chocolate just now, and realized that, in matters relating to groceries, the dream was exactly right on all counts. I will follow its advice after class tomorrow.

Every once in a while I’ll have a dream of a type I think of as an Ur-Dream. These are dreams that have a moderately coherent story, are aware that they’re dreams, comment on something I’ve been thinking about or reading, seep into/out of whatever I’ve been writing recently, and about which my lighter-weight dreams will henceforth write lots of fanfiction. The Two-and-a-Half Apocalypses Dream was one of these - it contains a lot of complaints about stuff I was working on at the time, and some of the characters and settings have shown up in another dreams since.

(They have titles. Some of them have credits and dedications. The Lightning Key Dream was scored by Bjorn Lynne, with character design by Himekawa Akira and environmental design by Abe Yoshitoshi and CLAMP. The Memory Witch Dream was dedicated to Jim Henson and Tanith Lee, and included appearances by Getting Lost In The Back Yard, Accidentally Sleeping Through Most Of Autumn, and The Confused Sick Person Whose Jacket Is Getting Thin At The Elbows, regular presences in my dreams since grade school.)

This is one from high school. I’m pretty sure I had it around the time I first read Kaori Yuki, because the Count Cain read-through made me think of it and dig my write-up out of the hard drive.

-

A certain wizard has many towers, can make another by blinking, and each comes out slightly different from the other, but he cannot make a perfect one. Once he has thrown away into a sun enough to fill a small city, he stops making them, because they come from nowhere and he feels the universe will collapse if too much matter unaccounted for comes into it. He keeps seven, in a t-shape, and lives in the center one, which has a library on the bottom floor out of which he has moved all the books, then sat down in and grown depressed.

The wizard and Bianca love unwisely; or rather, those who love Bianca believe that she is unwise to love him, young and powerful as she is, because he is a doddering old fool who can only make towers. Later, Bianca becomes older and sadder, and he can no longer keep her attention.

Continue reading “The Dream City”

I started playing Apollo Justice last night. It looks like the torch singer dream did mean something. It just wasn’t apparent until I started the game. I don’t know what it means yet, but surely this will become clear as I progress.

(Seriously, I must have read some spoilers at some point and then got them lost in my brain, because the dream knew way too much about the plot.)

Last night, apparently in reaction to yesterday’s terrible dietary crime, I dreamed about eating sprouts. I had bought several varieties from the store, and I removed the roots and ate them. That was the whole dream. It was pretty vivid. I could taste and smell the sprouts and everything.

Figuring that my brain was probably trying to tell me something*, I bought some sprouts when I went out to buy curry stuff today. Unfortunately, I accidentally got daikon sprouts. Which taste like, you know, daikon. I hate daikon. I’ve covered them with kimchi and am determined to work my way through them today. My subconscious went to a lot of trouble on this one.

-

* Probably an unwarranted assumption. I had another dream earlier in the night where Apollo Justice was a 20’s torch singer. I don’t think that means anything.

I actually made it through my shift at work last night (even though I shouldn’t really have gone at all, because I definitely had a fever), but it’s a very good thing I don’t have one tonight. I went to bed early last night, and, seeing as I don’t have class Thursdays anyway, set my alarm for four PM. It took probably two or three minutes before I managed to wake up enough to get over there and turn it off.

With the speed and alacrity of a reptile on an ice cube, I settled myself back on the bed and slowly surveyed my room. After some minutes of careful consideration, I came to the regretful conclusion that white rice and a single brownie was probably not an acceptable diet for an invalid. Having showered (an occupation not without its perils - slipperiness, sparkly dots in front of my eyes, my own hair, water) I called Murgatroyd and asked her if she could drive me down to the store, fearing my own inadvertent annihilation if I should walk. Despite the obviously grave danger to her own health, she agreed. I bought frozen pasta dishes, and pills.

I had a dream about orangutan villains last night. They were not so bad - the real trouble began when they were exposed to The Terrible Secret Of Space, and became pirate zombie orangutans in dashing greatcoats. They would not let me pass, and I was forced to draw my sword upon them and leap from the ship (it was in water, rather than in space, by this time) and swim for shore, which was evidently the expansive Ohio shore. I decided I ought to get back to the dorm as my first order of business, and from there plan my defense. For as we all know, zombie pirate orangutans have long memories, and a thirst for vengeance matched only by their thirst for brains, rum, and bananas.

Occasionally, since I woke up, I have found myself thinking, “Okay, now that I am back in the dorm, I should really be working on a plan for dealing with those orangutans…”

Inappropriate use of the song-lyrics-as-a-post-title technique!

While I was waking up this morning, I had two-and-a-half dreams about the apocalypse.

Dream 1

I am an Action Movie Protagonist Guy, but the skinny kind, that’s probably like a scientist or something. I’m an atheist, and I have an exasperated blond girlfriend who is some sort of a Christian. Sitting at the computer one afternoon, I realize that it has suddenly gone dark as night outside the blinds. Thinking suddenly of the Biblical signs of the apocalypse (note: some signs may have been made up for purposes of this dream), I spring into action and stay right there in the chair and check Google news, hoping against hope that I am wrong.

I am not wrong - the great meteor, Leviathan, has arrived to block out the sun, whose light will touch this earth no more. Leviathan’s dark surface glows faintly red in places, smoldering from within with a volcanic heat that, as a scientist, I know is improbable for an object of Leviathan’s relatively low mass, though possibly forgivable given its young geologic age. (Less than six thousand years, right? Ba-dum-ching.) The glow seems to trace out some sort of symbols, or perhaps a face, but I cannot quite make out the pattern. Perhaps it will become clearer as more of Leviathan falls to earth over the following months, as foretold by prophecy.

(characteristics of Leviathan based on similar meteors from Earthbound, Final Fantasy VII, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask)

But wait - if the meteor is already here, then, as foretold by prophesy (that I made up), the rapture must already have happened! Where is my blond Christian girlfriend?

But she is standing behind me, weeping silently, her face contorted with shame and grief - she did not really believe, and though others were taken, she has been left behind. I lead her away from this place as fire rains down, swearing to the apocalypse that this is not over.

Because I am an action movie protagonist, and I talk back to non-sentient things like the apocalypse and volcanoes and diabetic ketoacidosis as if they have a personally antagonistic relationship with me.

(real life intrudes - someone was being loud outside, and I woke up a little, but fell back asleep pretty fast)

Dream 1.5

Same apocalypse, different viewpoint. Now I am myself, at my parents’ house. We go out to buy groceries in preparation for whatever comes next. None of my family is gone, but the store is nearly empty. I pick out shallots and ginger root and listen to a man lecturing the people in the store about how wrong we were. I wonder why he is still here, and who was on the radio this morning preaching? (Because we are in post-apocalyptic times, radios, cars, and guns work, but nothing else. This is a necessary part of any good apocalypse and must not be overlooked.) I begin to suspect a conspiracy.

(characteristics of possibly-contrived religious apocalypse based on many preachy fantasy and sci-fi novels; post-disaster ginger-buying scene taken from my Havegale writing project)

But it really doesn’t matter much - the damage is done (I am sure that the vanished are never returning, wherever they are), and anyway my mind is made up. I see someone else listening to the preaching man with a disgusted expression, and comment quietly that, even if there is a god who has done this, and even if it should prove its reality to me, I will not believe in it. Because I have only my own conscience to guide me, and because hell is unconscionable, and because what has happened to the world is unconscionable, I will not believe in a god that would make them. If there is a heaven, I rebel against it.

The other person nods seriously, because this schpiel is my actual real-life opinion on the matter, and figments of my imagination cannot help but be moved by it.

We drive home over landscape that is now light and chromatically undersaturated, because Leviathan has all fallen to earth and the sun now shines through dust. In the field beside the house there is now a strange place, black and red and glowing, where large fragments of Leviathan seem to have burrowed. Men in black clothes swarm around it.

There is a way in. Looking over my shoulder as I take a bag from the car, I think that tonight, I will go down. I will give whatever lives inside Leviathan a piece of my mind.

(characteristics of evil-hole-in-the-ground based on Tailchaser’s Song, Richard Monaco’s Parsival, the mining stuff from the Darkover books)

(real life - I woke up because my neck hurt really bad, and realized I’d fallen asleep on the floor again. It was about eight AM, which was obviously too early, so I got into bed.)

Dream 2

New apocalypse.

My house is in the middle of a magical forest, where people often get lost two feet from their door, and where strange things with pearly eyes live under tobacco leaves. But the forest is small, and things from the outside, like radios and rust, have recently begun to encroach upon it.

People here never go outside at night, and think it shameful when they find themselves awake after dark - they hide in their rooms then.

But one night, I walk outside and look up. The stars are hard to see because of the bright lights of the outside world, which is really very close. Disappointed, I go back inside and close the door.

The next day, I have gone out for a second and gotten lost in the magic forest, but don’t really care. I take a nap under a leaf. Sometime later, Mom wakes me - there are men in black clothes here, looking at pieces of rusted metal and fiberglass debris that have fallen around me while I slept. The debris looks like pieces of someone’s Winnebago. The men cannot see me, and do not seem to see Mom clearly. She tells me that the world is ending, so I should come home.

The sky is orange, and then black.

Someone tells me what has happened. We have been, until now, in the Age of the Sun God - but he could only maintain his power while the people shunned the night. Last night, too many people looked at the sky, and now the era has turned, and it is the Age of the Moon Goddess. The sun will shine no more. There is nothing, this person tells me with finality, to be done about it.

I am secretly a little pleased.

But because I know my duty as the protagonist - and also because I realize, reluctantly, that a Moon Goddess who throws Winnebago parts in my magical forest probably cannot be relied upon to put on a proper Age Of The World - I begin to consider where I might find a cleric, a wizard, and a swordsman to round out my party. I cannot find any socks, but I put on my shoes and tell Mom that I am leaving to save the world. She says exasperatedly, “All right, dear.”

(my behavior towards the end based on Renge from Ouran High School Host Club, The Paper Bag Princess, Cimorene from Dealing With Dragons; Mom’s bad parenting taken from my Magus Anmere: Cyborg Werewolf project)

In my dreams last night, Steve Irwin wasn’t really dead, but was just on a road trip, with a big suitcase full of pot - he had faked his own death so that he could do this. I ran into him on a spiral stairway in a casino I was in somehow, and I was glad that he was still alive, but kind of sad, too, because he looked like it wasn’t one of the fun road trips, and because he wasn’t concealing his pot very well and wasn’t going to be able to keep from being arrested much longer. I watched him get on a train going to North Dakota.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a Not-Really-Dead dream about someone I didn’t know. I had no idea I had such strong feelings about the Crocodile Hunter.

(Last year I dreamed that Anne McCaffrey wrote a new Pern book that was good, but that’s not the same thing.)

I dreamed someone on LiveJournal was talking about Golden Sun’s terrible dialog and plot and said, “But if you can make it to just past the halfway point in The Lost Age, everything changes completely. I can’t tell you what happens - no, not even under a cut, because it is just that mind-blowing - but I will say that the dialog is suddenly awesome and hilarious.” And I ran to find my game.

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

I look forward to seeing Doctorow’s disappointment. He’s only read one volume, and he says “the pacing is very tight.” Hee.

Last night I dreamed that there was a beetle that sat quietly on a table while too men haggled over a strange, tiny, brass lamp - each one had a piece of the lamp, and they were going to put the two together and then sell it for a lot of money, because it was a very important, dangerous lamp. They put them together, and the beetle suddenly flew into the lamp, and something sharp touched their hands and they died.

Then it was a year later, and they found themselves alive again, and the world full of tunnels and people in masks, and somehow they remembered how this had happened, even though they had been dead. And there were the two pieces of the lamp again, and the beetle, and even though they remembered what had happened they found themselves starting over right where they had been, and they were negotiating for the lamp pieces again, staring at the beetle sitting quietly…

A few days ago I was half-asleep and banged my head on the bed frame - something I do constantly, so it’s not a big deal - and somehow it’s still really sore. I’d forgotten it had happened until I touched the side of my face last night and felt a sort of stabbing pain there. I worried I had, you know, head cancer for a couple minutes, and tried to figure out how you’d google “cancers that happen in your head but are not necessarily brain cancer,” but then remembered bumping my head. It makes me very nervous, though it is better today than it was last night.

Earlier I looked out the window, and saw huge strands of a spider web being blown apart somewhere drift by. The way they light hit them, they looked exactly like tendons. The spiders are building an animal in the trees, with silk for muscles and flies for a heart.

I’m dozing off a lot today. I also decided, while watching Princess Tutu and looking up at my shelf for a second, that a bird of some sort was totally about to peek out from under my fedora to show it’d heard that whole secret conversation on the screen.

Yesterday night I dreamed that I was in a dystopian cyberpunk city, trying to decide what to have for lunch. I have very specific priorities. I was happy to find a place that had sushi, but got annoyed when I saw tuna roll and salmon roll were ten bucks, and California roll was eight.

I was trying to figure out what the cheapest thing that still had actual fish in it was (fish is one of my very specific priorities), and saw they had something called “sketchy fish” for six dollars. A sketchy fish was lying on the chopping board, and it was kind of squashed-looking and seemed to be made partly out of blue plastic. I decided that this must be the origin of the word “sketchy” meaning “ill-reputable” or “untrustworthy,” and was very pleased with my etymological insight.

So I had a dream about sushi and etymology. I am a gigantic tool.

(I didn’t eat the sketchy fish; I got distracted by a robot and had to run and hide or something.)

I just napped for seven hours because I am sick and weak and wear ruffly poet clothes and Tohru called me by my first name.

I had a dream where Sasuke from Naruto, Agent X from Deadpool, Baron Wulfenbach from Girl Genius, and the Narnia children were trying to save the world from some kind of problem with space. But there was great tension and angst between the heroes, and they couldn’t work together as a team (no!), so they all went off on their own.

I was one of those albino super-intelligent telepaths you get in anime, and I’d been ordered by the mad scientist who created me to keep an eye on Sasuke, the most unstable of the heroes. At first, I was five years old and had itty-bitty fangs, but I had a Great Shock towards the end of the dream, which apparently aged me to about thirty.

Sasuke was based in Florida, building up a team of fanfic-writing middle-school girls to carry out his plans, with three or four of the adult Naruto characters around to manage them. Only one of the adults (I don’t know his name, or even if he was a real character) realized that Sasuke had become a cokehead - he frequently gave Sasuke sad looks with ominous piano music, sighed, and said nothing to the others. He glared at me whenever I was about to say anything. My Shadowy Creator, who was one of the frivolous, giggly mad scientists, offered me an educational video involving singing puppets to solve Sasuke’s problem, but I was not enthusiastic.

Sasuke knew that I was there to spy on him, and did petty things like forgetting to inform me of meetings and breaking the complicated weapons my Shadowy Creator sent me to try and get rid of me. At one point this worked well enough that, against my Shadowy Creator’s express orders, I left to rescue Agent X and Baron Wulfenbach from some mad scientists, and was duly chastened to find they’d gotten away fine without my help. However, while investigating the scientists’ labs, I accidentally discovered something disturbing about my own creator’s past, and returned to Sasuke’s base deeply unsettled in mind and spirit.

You could tell that I was upset because, when I arrived back, I threw one of Sasuke’s middle-school girls against the wall when she said something obnoxious to me, and then walked off without noticing the shocked looks the others gave me. The narration was a pretty loose third-person-omniscient type, I guess. It was also at this point that I was suddenly a grim, embittered thirty-year-old instead of a spooky savant-child.

Sasuke was holding a meeting, clearly high - the adult ninjas now all knew what was going on. I sat off to the side, brooding on what I’d learned and wondering how I could speak to my Shadowy Creator, now, without letting on that I knew his secrets. There was no doubt that he would kill me when he realized. Suddenly, Sasuke jumped at me with a small knife, cutting my upper thigh before I pinned him - me being twice his size and not stoned and flailing. I snarled at him and shoved him at one of the adult ninjas, who looked at me opaquely. They were all unwilling to go against their leader. It was no longer safe for me at the ninja base in Florida.

I grabbed up my bag and stormed out again, deciding to search for the Narnia children, who, I knew from my Shadowy Creator’s reports, were incompetent and making no progress - but who also, at least, had no dark secrets. As I walked through the night across the rice paddies (rice paddies?), I belatedly noticed that the moon was forty times its normal size, and writing was appearing in the Milky Way. Somewhere, the clockwork dragon from Unico and the Island of Magic screamed. The terrible secret of space had come.

Wow. This shirt is not tight anymore. I lost weight.

…

*looks blankly at box of chocolates*

…And I’m too nauseous to celebrate in the logical fashion.

I guess I’ll go to the cafeteria and see if apples will go down. *Again.*

I had a really complicated dream last night. There were mermaids, a labyrinth, a tin key and a golden key that both opened the same door, but to slightly different places, the ocean rising, the ocean boiling, a cyberpunk sewer with hidden control rooms from which an elderly couple work tirelessly to get the water back where it belongs, clones, I think a plague that kills birds, and a Canadian stereotype with one of those hats, played by Joe Don Baker. He saved the day.

My subconscious is unwontedly sarcastic.

Naturally when I order series books off ILL, they come all out of order.

Sometimes I must dream about cats. When I see a picture of one or read something about them, I get confused and wonder why any aren’t sitting on me, and look around to make sure I didn’t leave any food sitting out without a dishtowel over it. I feel like something furry’s been nudging my arm recently, but I know nothing has. So I must have dreamed about cats.

Unless I am a werewolf.