I had a recurring dream last night.
Oct. 1st, 2011 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matt_doyleWell, not exactly -- upon waking it seemed cobbled together from at least three separate vivid narrative dreams I have had in the oast -- but for the duration of the dream, the fact that it was recurring was a major plot element.
I and several friends (some actual friends, some fictional) were in a bizarre, surreal forest. We knew that we were there because the old world -- the real world -- was gone. This world was built from our dreams, and the only way to survive was to find a stable place within it, free of nightmares.
But there was a problem. The cycle of day and night kept accelerating, and every time the nights were longer and more nightmarish. Our only hope was to outrace the night.
In the dream, this gave us two options -- one, try and prolong the days by moving westward as fast as we could, racing the sun. Since I knew I had dreamed this before, I could confirm that eventually, running westward, we would come to a relatively peaceful land of eternal twilight -- not without its own dangers, but where there was shelter from the night.
The only problem was that before we reached it, we would have to pass through a grove of nightmares haunted by a tremendous black wolf. nobody was a fan of that notion.
The second option was to assume the days and nights were uneven because we were at far north latitude, and head south as fast as we could. None of us had done this before, but we encountered a steady stream of refugees doing so, and many of my friends were eager to join up with them for safety's sake. The problem there was if that did not work, by the time we could turn around and flee northwest, we'd be plunging into eternal night, unimaginably more dangerous than anything we had faced thus far.
We turned south. While the days did begin to even, we met with hostility from the townsfolk along thye way whose lives we unsettled, and the politics of the refugee caravan kept shifting, trying to expel unwanted elements or unite behind leaders with contradictory visions. It was one of those dreams in which your sense of the passage of time is accelerated or elided, and the dream was very episodic -- months past as we made for the sea, and boats that could carry us to an equatorial continent, unsettled but allegedly safe... if we could all afford passage on a boat. The details become hazy, but I'm pretty sure that I and a few friends who trusted me sold our possessions and gave up our money to opther passengers, and got ready to turn northwest and look for the refuge I'd found before. We camped in abandoned houses, argued over the safe path (and whether or not any given fortified location might be safe enough to remain, rather than pressing on).. it was intense and amazing.
And of course, all the most relevant details of it slipped through my fingers the moment I woke up.
I'm going to go back and look at the dream diary entries, because I remember the grove of nightmares and the wolf, I remember the weird, otherworldly twilight-country that was half-refuge and half-prison (there were faeries in a cemetery there, and if you waited near them too long they would tease away your memory until you became one of them, an elf, blithe and beautiful and sinister, living in the eternal present). I want to see if I blogged about the precursors to this dream... because of course, I can't really be sure that these dreams even existed. My brain may have conjured and confabulated their history as a framework for this more recent fantasy.
You would think a dream about racing nightmares might itself be a nightmare, but really, it was a Hell of an adventure. Maybe the best part of the dream was that I was brave and decisive enough to help lead people through it.
I and several friends (some actual friends, some fictional) were in a bizarre, surreal forest. We knew that we were there because the old world -- the real world -- was gone. This world was built from our dreams, and the only way to survive was to find a stable place within it, free of nightmares.
But there was a problem. The cycle of day and night kept accelerating, and every time the nights were longer and more nightmarish. Our only hope was to outrace the night.
In the dream, this gave us two options -- one, try and prolong the days by moving westward as fast as we could, racing the sun. Since I knew I had dreamed this before, I could confirm that eventually, running westward, we would come to a relatively peaceful land of eternal twilight -- not without its own dangers, but where there was shelter from the night.
The only problem was that before we reached it, we would have to pass through a grove of nightmares haunted by a tremendous black wolf. nobody was a fan of that notion.
The second option was to assume the days and nights were uneven because we were at far north latitude, and head south as fast as we could. None of us had done this before, but we encountered a steady stream of refugees doing so, and many of my friends were eager to join up with them for safety's sake. The problem there was if that did not work, by the time we could turn around and flee northwest, we'd be plunging into eternal night, unimaginably more dangerous than anything we had faced thus far.
We turned south. While the days did begin to even, we met with hostility from the townsfolk along thye way whose lives we unsettled, and the politics of the refugee caravan kept shifting, trying to expel unwanted elements or unite behind leaders with contradictory visions. It was one of those dreams in which your sense of the passage of time is accelerated or elided, and the dream was very episodic -- months past as we made for the sea, and boats that could carry us to an equatorial continent, unsettled but allegedly safe... if we could all afford passage on a boat. The details become hazy, but I'm pretty sure that I and a few friends who trusted me sold our possessions and gave up our money to opther passengers, and got ready to turn northwest and look for the refuge I'd found before. We camped in abandoned houses, argued over the safe path (and whether or not any given fortified location might be safe enough to remain, rather than pressing on).. it was intense and amazing.
And of course, all the most relevant details of it slipped through my fingers the moment I woke up.
I'm going to go back and look at the dream diary entries, because I remember the grove of nightmares and the wolf, I remember the weird, otherworldly twilight-country that was half-refuge and half-prison (there were faeries in a cemetery there, and if you waited near them too long they would tease away your memory until you became one of them, an elf, blithe and beautiful and sinister, living in the eternal present). I want to see if I blogged about the precursors to this dream... because of course, I can't really be sure that these dreams even existed. My brain may have conjured and confabulated their history as a framework for this more recent fantasy.
You would think a dream about racing nightmares might itself be a nightmare, but really, it was a Hell of an adventure. Maybe the best part of the dream was that I was brave and decisive enough to help lead people through it.
