Journal and Misc Madness
Mage-school dream
Set scene: I'm a new apprentice "with great potential" in a prestigious school of magic, sitting in a room with a few of the other apprentices (about 10). This includes a tall, beautiful (if sort of big-boned) blond, very smooth skin, named Julia who was incapable of even lighting a candle with magic, and it was slowly driving her crazy. Every failure made it worse. Also, the teachers were all gone, leaving the school defenseless for the moment.
Enter Brax and his two cronies. He's a low-level mage from a rival school who thought to come to ours to extort something while the teachers were gone, and his cronies are his apprentices. All of the apprentices are afraid of him. He's way more advanced than they are. He starts blustering and threatening. I walk up and knee him in the gut. He collapses coughing. His apprentices try simple lightning spells on me, but I'm better than they are and shrug them off. Our guys bum-rush them and take them out.
Cut-scene
We're now sitting around wondering when the retaliation will hit. Julia is almost moaning. I go up and give her a hug (she's very touchy-feely). She rubs my cheek with hers, and I whisper in her hair, "You do have the power. I can feel it." This was totally untrue, but it built her confidence enough that she was able to make a few sparks fly between her fingers. Can we say positive feedback loop? We then hear a rumor that the rival academy is sending an elite hit-squad to wipe out us upstart kids.
Cut-scene
Standing around what looks like an empty elevator shaft, rooms or hallways at multiple levels in multiple directions. In teleport four mages and everyone scatters. They jump down level after level, at each one facing off with one of the academy mages (who've returned sometime). It's a pretty even fight. Then the other two show up. They are the best there are. Two mages as unlike as day and night. One tall, red-haired, wearing WWI ace regalia, named Hassan. The other a short, green-furred rat wearing a badger costume named Winston. They start laying waste. I hide at the top level of the shaft and watch the bottom level (a library/multimedia center) where people are running back and forth. Winston and Hassan first kill off the five or so academy mages and then start chasing the students back and forth, yelling out their kills to one another for score-keeping. They teleport without casting any spells. No one sees me at the top of the shaft, but I see Julia get chased deeper into the library.
I stand up and teleport, hearing as it takes effect an old man saying "Now they'll know. He lead them right to him." Obviously they have in effect a powerful spell that allows them free teleportation and traces anyone elses. I run deeper into the library, looking for Julia or any others. As I duck behind a stack of books, I see Hassan teleport in. Instead of blindly running through the ambush area, he goes up to the counter, picks up a VR headset, and puts it over his ace goggles. He starts instructing it, the gist of which is that he could virtually scan the library without moving, and find everyone's hiding spots. While he instructed it, I snuck up behind him and got an arm around his throat, grabbed one hand with mine to block finger movements. Sleeper... he's out. I drag him behind a stack of books, the VR headset's cord trailing behind us as a tracer beacon. As I get to cover, in teleports Winston. He looks around, sees the cord, and follows. His badger-costume head is off, revealing his green rat-face. As he comes around the corner and sees me with Hassan, Julia ducking behind me and a few of the others nearby, he grins. "Looks like I win," he says, referring to the contest and the kills he's about to get. He gloats for a while longer, until I get sick of it, grab his foot, and with a simple strength spell start using him as a bat, slamming his head against the floor. We then tie up their fingers, gag them, and blindfold them.
Fade to black.
Narrative Dawn-of-time dream (See 5/11/99 entry)
I see a pantheon of ousted gods talking together in a colliseum-type place, wondering what went wrong with their reign. Their meeting is conducted in business-like fashion, with one leader and his subordinates. The implication is that they're the last in a long chain of pantheons that have failed the world of their birth, and that there will be others. The meeting takes place as both pictures and words, as if it's a movie with narration, and the narration is very lyrical and beautiful. I see the thoughts of the gods, and nudge them here and there, when words fail. They discuss the future.
Cut-scene.
A wandering peddler visits the home of a farmer, a giant. He receives the hospitality of the farm, but in time finds an interest in the giant's daughter, who at the time has yet to reach her full growth. They sit together amidst the hay and sunshine in a wide-open barn, talking and flirtint. The farmer's wife passes by, glares at the peddler. The narration continues throughout this, in such beautiful phrasing that even mostly asleep I wish I could write this way while conscious. Time passes. Again, the peddler and the farmer's daughter are in the barn, and the farmer is at the front porch of his house ushering in the local priest-advisor of the new pantheon. He needs advise about how to handle this growing interest between his daughter and this lingering traveler. The peddler and farmgirl couple in the barn, and the only phrase of the narration that I still remember occurs here, just as I wake up: "He had a way of looking at her, like a dove looking through the eyes of a man, as he gave way to the pleasure of the Moment of Stars."
I awaken, and regret the necessity of losing the beauty of the narrator's prose.
Drew Dream
I am in a wide-open house, sitting on a couch on one side of a circle of plush chairs. Others are around me, including my dad, a casting director, and Drew Barrymore, who I'm helping read lines for a Shakespeare play. We've been over the lines that she's reading before, and I've forgotten them, not expecting to have to do them again. My dad pushes me to find the lines in a HUGE book of Shakespeare while Drew fumbles through on her own. I can't find the right play; the book is too huge.
Cut-scene.
We're coming home, the interview over. Paparazzi and reporters are everywhere.
Cut-scene.
We're in my dad's house. Drew is relaxing on the sofa in the living room, a news helicopter is outside, other people are lazing around. The news helicopter is annoying. I look at it from the window, and notice the other five helicopters hiding behind it, over the linden tree in the front yard. As I watch, one of those five breaks off from the others. It's a police chopper, and it orders the others to disperse. They all do, except for one. From that one a man leans out with an M60 and starts to shoot the police chopper, which starts to smoke and list in the air. The police chopper responds with lethal force, firing a pair of FFARs into the "news" chopper. It explodes not 20 feet from the front window of the house, and I dodge lots of shrapnel, a good portion of which comes through the top of the house. Drew is not so lucky. She's wounded. We head out to the hospital to save her life, and as we leave I notice a note on the front door addressed to me from Jackie Chan. It says, "You've been recruited for a war the scope of which you can't imagine. I'm willing to fight on your side for a small introductory fee. Meet me at the following location..."
Cut-scene.
I'm in an alley, waiting to meet Jackie Chan. I'm next to an unmarked white van. He drives up in a small sportscar (very small). As he gets out, I realize that it's not him. For one thing he has a mustache, and hair on his chest, and his jaw isn't shaped right. He sees me notice that, and rips off a hairpiece that he's affixed to his chest, and gesturing to his face says, "A disguise. Get it?" We work out details, and head to the hospital.
Cut-scene.
House-Trap Dream
I've been having a sequence of dreams over the past year or so that take place in my dad's house. The house, in the dream, has a few secret passages, which are used for entrance to odd places or escape from pursuit. The staircase from the ground floor to the second floor has a bannister along half of its length. This bannister ends when the stair passes the ceiling of the first floor, and within reach from this point is a hanging light fixture.
In these dreams, this is the major pathway to strange places. The light fixture has to be unscrewed, which releases a trap door with rungs for climbing. It's a bit of a stretch, but possible to get into the very tight passageway. When the light fixture is pulled back into place, a slide opens up that leads around a looping path within the walls of the house and comes out in or below the basement. The fit of this slide is such that only a very slim person could fit, which makes it a perfect escape path for me. Also, when the slide opens, the trap door locks, so no one else can enter.
Sometimes the slide comes out in the basement, sometimes below the basement in a series of tunnels. It varies. Either way, there is a small extension of the basement, usually on the floor. It looks like a small safe, and has a combination lock. It opens up to an even tighter passageway that leads to various places, depending on the nature of the dream. Sometimes it leads back to the top of the slide, where I can unlock the trap door or even come out (great escape if someone did manage to follow me, because there's no way that they could fit in the return path). Sometimes it leads into tunnels below the basement (if the slide enters the basement) or even another dimension. Sometimes it leads to a series of hidden passageways and peepholes within the walls. Sometimes it's just a safe with something valuable in it. Usually there is a timed mechanism that activates when the trap door upstairs opens up. I have to get to the "safe", correctly enter the combination, and do whatever I need to do before the time limit is up, or it closes and locks me in. That's the annoying part, but also the fun part. A quick loop down the slide, through the safe trap, and back up to the slide to lock in my pursuers is quite a ride.
The latest incarnation of this dream was a variation on this theme. The walls of the house were gone, leaving the slide, the basement, the sleeping titan in the basement, and some of the hidden passageways. It was basically a skeletal representation of a pathway that I've become very familiar with lately. Really cool. There was a party of newcomers, though, who'd never seen any of this stuff before, and I watched them try to figure it out. Fun for the whole family!
Journal Entries
5/11/99: My muse came upon me in my sleep last night and smacked me hard for not doing her bidding with suitable facility. I dreamed the dream of Xanadu. I dreamed of a time when gods and religions and the laws of man were as fad diets are today and the memory of sorrow was as fleeting as a summer breeze. But it wasn't entirely a dream. I was conscious through half of it. I had but to suggest a course of action and it would unfold itself with a lyrical beauty that I simply cannot describe. The dream was both in images and in word-pictures. I have the words to describe it. I have the knowledge of language. I don't have the freedom, however. This dream-that-was-not-a-dream pulled my knowledge of words and my unconscious creativity together and painted a world in poetry. It did what I, in a conscious state, can't do, which is turn off the analytical side of my brain and just exist. I envy my unconscious self that. I wish I knew how to do that at will.
The images of the dream remain in a foggy form, such that I know the form but not the details, but the words have completely fled from my memory. One phrase remains. The wandering peddler had seduced the daughter of the farmer, who was a giant. (This was not a carnal dream at all, but had sensuality in it.) The phrase: "He had a way of looking at her, like a dove looking through the eyes of a man, as he gave way to the pleasure of the Moment of Stars." I think you can figure out the reference "Moment of Stars" yourself. That phrase was what the dream "said" as the picture unfolded of the two in a barn, while the giant ushered the local priest-advisor into his home to ask his advice about what to do about his daughter's habits. That's the only example I remember, but EVERY SINGLE SCENE in the dream had such verbiage attached, and if I could do that while conscious I'd be a much better writer. Even now, before I type in any words, the analytical part of my brain scans over what I intend to say before allowing it to flow through my fingers, and in so doing edits it to a form that I consider acceptable as far as grammar and content are concerned. I wish I could turn that off, just live in the moment and write what I feel and see without the filter of "acceptable" writing style.