matt_doyle

 Hi everyone, I promise I still exist.

Anyway, two derams last night.  In the first, a friend and I were guests in a large house -- but so were a number of other people, and so we wound up having to share a bed.  There was audible noise from more than one of the other beds, indicating people having sex, and I made a joke about the music of the springs.

My friend swallowed, looked me in the eye, slipped his hand into mine, and said "Would you care to waltz, or do you prefer to tap-dance?"

Which is, I think, the smoothest, classiest proposition I have ever received.



Anyway, the second dream was a much larger narrative.  As is so often true in dreams, different casts of characters and intersections with fictional narratives came and went, so I'm going to trim my summary down to the truly relevant.

There was a large victorian house in town -- four or five stories tall, but it fit on a normal-sized lot (with very little room for yard left over); and in that house was a middle-aged women who ran a knick-knacks business of some sort.  In the course of bargaining for trinkets, she had the habit of setting a hook into the souls of her customers -- not all of her customers, but those who had known significant misery and deprivation.

She would then make over one of the rooms in her house so that it suited them perfectly.  After a couple weeks in town, she would vanish, and the interior of the house would vanish along with her -- and so would anyone she'd hooked, if she could lure them in.

Personally, I didn't qualify as sufficiently miserable, but the majority of my friends in this dream did -- at which point, facing the notion of their being hypnotized into a kidnapping where they would live forever inside this mazy house, seldom leaving their rooms and never exhibiting any emotion but a dazed, manic cheer -- yeah, then I met the qualifications, too.  i tried to bargain with the lady to let my friends free, or I'd cause trouble for her -- instead what I got (in exchange for the promise of a place in her collection), was a sort of non-interference pact.  She wouldn't kick me out of the house if I wanted to snoop around for a way to save my friends.

While snooping, accompanied by a few of my more distant pals who did NOT meet the misery qualifications, and whose main job was to pull me out of the house if I started setting up house in a spare bedroom rather than searching (this happened more than once, and it was terrifying); I discovered that the house could change shape, and that the lady hadn't created it.  She was no witch, really -- just the inmate who had been there longest, the only one who could remember a time when the house was an asylum, and before that a circus.

Something about that knowledge worried her enough to start directly kidnapping my already-snared friends, and to send thugs (some sort of goblins, who rode on flying mufflers that only worked if you were over a street) after my unaffected pals -- but she couldn't touch me.  So I was left with the knowledge that, somehow, I was close to getting what I needed -- but no notion of why or what to do next.

That's about when I woke up.

 In the first dream I recall last night, I was living in a secret underground commune.  The social mores were very... Spider Robinson-esque.  However, in the time we were there, time seemed to be passing at a different rate on the surface, so when we tunneled back up, we found ourselves under a residential area, and the locals were very concerned and alarmed by the notion that a bunch of troglodytes might pop up under their floorboards without warning.

Not a terribly coherent dream.

Like several of my dreams, it incorporated a lot of surreal architecture, some of it familiar from previous dreams -- my high school cafeteria does, in fact, have large stairwells on either side of it, but those stairwells do not, in fact, lead down into a multi-story underground library.  However, I've had several college-centric dreams where that library has been there was well.  It doesn't use the Dewey Decimal system, either -- as you descend, the subject matter becomes more arcane and secretive and mysterious.

Also, one floor was a carbon copy of the Eagan public library, whose architecture in the real world is just strange enough that it always seemed like a magic palace of some sort to me when I was growing up.

In my second dream, I was taking weird public transit all over the Twin Cities, and kept bumping into two of my friends --on several separate occasions, on different days, in different parts of the city, suddenly there they were, on the same bus as I was.

Especially strange since, though those friends do live in the Cities, they sure as Hell don't take public transit.

 So due to a sudden increase in my stress levels (detailed in a locked post; for purposes of public discussion let's just note that it is eustress not distress and move on), I had positively wretched dreams last night.

First, I dreamed that due to a paperwork technicality, I had to go back and repeat my last semester of highschool at age 28.  This meant returning to my hometown and moving back in with my parents.

Also I stumbled on a secret crime conspiracy at school which half the teachers hated and half were complicit in.  Both halves thought I was on the other side.


After that dream wrapped up inconclusively with me carrying a sleeping baby on a rocky bus ride; I dreamed that Steampunk Moriarty had kidnapped hundreds of people across a dimensional barrier.  We all wound up on a world that was one giant trainyard, our track was switched wrong and jammed, and we were all going to crash.  Nobody on the train but me realized the significance and immediacy of this problem, so it was up to me and only me to evacuate hundreds of disoriented, mistrustful, stubborn people from the train with under sixty seconds to spare.

When I woke up we were maybe five seconds, ten seconds from the crash, and I had evacuated all of three people and was about to bail out myself.


My head.  Ugh.

I dreamed a dark, absurdist comedy dream in which two husband-wife teams of suicide bombers, one muslim and one christian, find they're assigned to hit the same target, argue about how to do it and whether to do it, try to go home... but have not adequately disposed of all their weapons, so all four wind up on the same side in a fatal shoot-out with airport security in Tunisia.

I also dreamed about interviewing George Lucas, and the sex lives of the X-Men in the 1960s.

Last night I dreamed that:

1) a dutiful, noble spy I knew and respected had gained the power to subconsciously project his wishes, frustrations, and ambitions: the resukt being a reality-warping, half-invincible superspy with a murderous agenda.  Spider-Man, Black Widow, and I had to find a way to put him down.

2) Legolas, Meryy, Pippin, and I were questing together... in World of Warcraft.

#)  oh BALLS I remembered this dream not five minutes ago and it was really cool.  Stupid brain chemistry.

In the first act, I was Luke Skywalker, and I was doing Star Warsy things with X-wings and wookiees.

In the second, I was me again, and after failing to assemble a gaming group in a timely fashion, I stumbled into a theater.  It was a production of Phantom of the Opera, but haunted.  The actor who had originated the part locally was possessing the three who had it now (one for singing, one for stunts and swordplay, one who would make dramatic appearances -- if Phantom A exited stage left, moments later he would appear in the back of the theater, stage right.

Good direction, dream.

Anyway, I tried to hide but got spotted, ran away, Megan and I climbed the backstage stairs (which were set up like one of those fire escape ladders that folds up into the balcony above it, so we had to climb the curtain to even get started), I monkeyed about in the rigging and dropped down behind the Phantom with a prop sword, held him hostage, and started getting the exposition version of how this all came to happen... and then I woke up.

So last night I dreamed about Norse deities riding flying iceberg, my maternal grandfather hanging out with JRR Tolkien, and parts of The Hellion Prince taking place in Hobbiton.  There was a plot in which a magically caused drought was ruining the land, and in searching for the magic item that was causing it, I passed through set pieces from previous dreams (which have been recurring before):  the gloaming forest of the fey (which is even rather setting-appropriate), and a mountainous, mazy set of plateaus and ridges that I think has been a feature in dreams I forgot to record (or at least, dreams in which I forgot to record that feature).  Those plateaus always show up representing the same sort of thing -- a distant land outside the bounds of civilization.  They are Foreign Country, writ large in dream letters.  I'll try to make a note of it if they show up again. 

I've discussed before how various set pieces recur in my dreams (actually I think I've discussed it in a different post, too, but I cannot find that one), and it always fascinates me how much re-purposing my subconscious does.  Am I on a limited shooting budget or something?

Also, not a famous musician, but whatever.

So as of 5:14 PM today, I'll be 28 years old and allegedly at the physical peak of my existence!  I should exercise more.

Dreamed I was Robin last night.  I had a cape that let me glide for extremely long distances, and I used it to cross a freezing-cold strait, headed for a secret research station.  Not sure why.  I did it twice, too, only I got lost the second time... and in between those times, dreamed I was living in a massive ramshackle house with a bunch of teenaged girls who kept looking up porn on my computer.  Dunno what that was about.

Goals for today:  write 3500+ words and finish the next chapter of The Hellion Prince.  Eat hamburgers.  

Birthday party is on Wednesday -- sushi and sake at my favorite sushi joint, followed by board games and other drinks at my apartment.  If you're in the Fargo-Moorhead area and want to attend (and I don't hate you), let me know!

... took elements of the Vlad Taltos novels, the Kushiel novels, Casablanca, Star Wars, Greek Mythology, and Veronica Mars.  A retired assassin on the run returned to his home turf (that turf was definitely Casablanca -- did my brain just mispronounce Adrilankha?) after a shipwreck and an encounter with the Angel of Death and an old man trapped on an island.  Once there, he (I) dodged both law enforcement and criminals with the help of his buddy Weevil, until he could set up an appointment with his old lieutenant.  There was now a droid (specifically a Gonkbot) in the office, which some of the people disapproved of.

About half the background parts in this dream were played by Peter Dinklage, possibly because I just read an interview where he expressed a preference for playing parts that were NOT specifically written for dwarfs.

That's more or less the only element of the dream I understand.

Weird dreams.  At the beginning of the night, I was Robin and fighting crime with the Teen Titans.  Then, as the dream progressed, I became Indir from Madcap Archaeology, the Titans became the rest of that team, and we attempted to outmaneuver masterminds of organized crime, lead by Malcolm McDowell, who were trying to trap Vessa into an organized marriage.  I think.  Identities kept changing.  And most of the dream took place in or around massive sepulchers in a cemetery that seemed to stretch on for miles in every direction.  In any case, there was also rather a lot of sex in that portion of the dream, which I am not planning to relate in details but which was more than slightly mind-blowing.

In the third stage of the dream, I was the Doctor from Doctor Who... alternating between Tom Baker and David Tennant...  and the Master (John Simm) and I were working together, attempting to navigate a shapeshifting house in order to find where Malcolm McDowell was holding Romana prisoner.

The thing making this dream unusual was, I think, that even within the dream I could remember the shifts in narrative.  There was only a limited sense of continuity to my identity -- sometimes I remembered the previous arcs of dream as though they happened to me-as-a-different-character, and sometimes I was only dimly aware that in this story, there were many people who were very unhappy with Mr, McDowell and his extremely well-tailored white tuxedo.