Zeborah

We were all the same age, 11 boys and 3 girls. At a certain point, about seven of us went to live with Garak on Cardassia. One by one he killed us off, but he liked me, believing I took after him. Unfortunately he then learned (by means of a device on my finger(*) that put me into a virtual reality he could control) that my admirable duplicity was in aid of the less pleasing goal of reforming (my pov) / corrupting (his pov) Cardassia. This discovery was a great disappointment to us both, but we handled things in a civilised manner: we sat down to read a book together so that he could reach behind me and stab me in the back. I was a little concerned whether he was sufficiently advised of human anatomy to make it relatively painless, but please note this was not an anxiety dream of any kind: it was a touching father-son moment.

I did wake with a sensation of a tinge in my back, though.


(*) Boots has got rather more matted fur than I thought, so yesterday I started attempting to comb a bit of it out. I got sufficient fur to make a mouse, and a gouge in my finger pad, so I was wearing a bandaid overnight.

Or possibly a year and a half of living with earthquakes, but I'm going to blame the Hunger Games (which I watched yesterday with my siblings, despite having not read the book, and enjoyed a lot) on the grounds that earthquakes haven't given me nightmares before. A few anxiety dreams, but not waking-up-with-heart-racing nightmares. Not that movies ordinarily give me dreams either, but.


So in my dream -- there's various ordinary dream stuff, like showing my juvenilia to someone and someone else playing with a... reptile-bird-thing? and getting something in my hair that I'd just washed and having to time to wash and dry it again.

But then I was going somewhere along a forest path and realised I'd left my mini backpack behind. (This is my zebra-striped mini backpack that for the last year and a half has gone with me everywhere. I mean like the other night I thought, "I'm tired, I'll just leave it in the other room while I go to bed," and then I thought, "Don't be stupid, you can't go to bed without having your keys and wallet and cellphone and expired passport and ereader and notepaper for emergencies by your bed," and then I thought, "This is an irrational yet valid point," and went to get my mini backpack in order to go to bed.)

So in my dream when I realised I'd left it behind I immediately turned around to go and hunt for it. And came across Dad who had with him not one but two zebra-striped umbrellas, and I was trying to figure out which was mine. About the time I decided, Dad made a comment about a storm coming and I turned to look at the clouds he pointed out (the forest had now turned into the Ilam Fields) and I said something like, "That... kind of looks like a twister."

So we started running away from the twisters. There were at this point dozens or hundreds of us, all running across the Ilam Fields, and I was thinking there was no way we were going to be able to outrun all those twisters.

And then I noticed a blue robot next to a tree on the edge of the field we were going to run past. It was about small-adult-height, but it had no legs, being blocky like a toy, and it was toy-blue, and it had a toy face with a big red dimpled smile. And it shot bolts of energy at us as we came, and the people it shot died bleeding, and it smiled at the blood.

(Think of the creepiest monster you've ever seen on Doctor Who. That's how creepy it was.)

And then I saw another robot on our other side, also shooting, but we had to keep running with the twisters behind us, through this gauntlet of robots, and part of me was making sure I stayed in the middle of the crowd so I might be able to get through while they shot the people around me, and part of me was thinking, was I seriously using the people around me as human shields? and the answer was yes, yes I was, because twisters and creepy smiling shooting robots.

And then I got shot anyway - it hit my umbrella but the shock still knocked me to the ground and I woke before finding out if they'd have noticed I was still alive.


(I like to think not. But they were sadists, not stupid. And besides, there were still those twisters to contend with.)

I had a story idea yesterday which I wrote down as "locking prisoners' minds in a labyrinth". Ie a mental labyrinth and Our Protagonist would manage somehow to escape or something, but that's all I got and then I went on to doing other things.

Also at dinner with my family the conversation turned briefly to lucid dreaming.

So last night I had a dream in which I was thinking more about this story and in my dream I realised that the escape method would involve lucid dreaming because the "labyrinth" would essentially be a dream. [Also I learned a writing rule that if you're wanting the story to seem to be about one thing before the Sudden Twist to it being about something else, then the optimum amount to write about the first thing is 1500 words. There was a caveat that if you're writing a short story instead of a novel then it's fewer words, but my dream didn't tell me how many fewer.]

And then this morning I was lying in, enjoying the fact that I could lie in, and dozing, and I had a dream about a... mirror, I think? framed in gilded leather or something, and I realised it was a dream, and wanted to touch it to see what it felt like. And so I tried to reach out but I wasn't actually there because it was just a dream so it was like I was going to have to create my hand out of nothing in order to do it. While I was trying to do that, there was a humming and I thought, "Darn, I'm waking up." But either I didn't actually wake, or I woke and promptly went back to sleep, but then it was a book and I managed with a great effort to reach out and turn a page - it just happened very quickly and jerkily, like there wasn't enough processor power in my brain to simulate my actual hand in proper detail and at proper frames per second.

But I made myself read the book, but it was nonsense like the spam you get which reads like language but isn't. I turned another page and looked at the page numbers - they kept jumping around and I had to concentrate to make them go up in proper increments as I turned them. I came to the middle of a signature and it had been stapled, which made me indignant because it should have been sewn. So I concentrated hard and sort of wiped down the fold and made it sewn -- but it was only sewn in exactly the places the staples had been, which made me laugh as I realised this was a lack of processor power again.

I reached the back of the book, and the endpaper was printed with a map of the city which the book was about, and the person who owned the book had written in "calle" and other labels in Spanish. By this point I think my lucidity had worn off, and shortly after that I woke up.

This is the thing about my lucid dreams: I'm lucid for a while, and then it wears off. And often when I wake I'm not sure whether I was actually aware that it was a dream or if I was just dreaming that I was aware that it was a dream. I don't know if the distinction is meaningful but I think it is because it has a bearing on control.

When I used to read up on lucid dreaming, people would write all sorts of enthusiastic things about it, like how you can do anything you want. And I can't. I knew what a sewn signature was supposed to look like but I couldn't make it that way. More fundamentally, my universe was circumscribed: in that dream, there was nothing except for the book. The book wasn't on anything; I wasn't on anything; my body didn't exist, which is why it was so hard to get my hand there to turn the pages. And it didn't even occur to me that I might want to do something that didn't involve the book.

Once the book ended, so did the dream.

So I wonder if I was actually in control or if I just thought I was? And if I was in control, is my control bound within the limits of the dreamiverse I found myself in? Or could I have travelled to another dreamiverse and it's just a matter of practice?

All of this is fodder for the story, it turns out.

So I've got leave for a week so I can go to bed as late as I want and sleep in as long as I want. So last night I went to bed on time for the first night in weeks. I guess I felt like there wasn't a rush to do as much as possible before work starts again. I furthermore predict that on Sunday week I'll be going to bed really late. Brains are stupid.

Anyway, so after waking up this morning at 6:45 to the sound of my alarm clock not going off, I went back to sleep and had awesome dreams. I do keep telling myself that I get the best dreams when I'm not sleep-deprived, but it doesn't help when I'm trying to do as much as possible before work starts again.

Dream the first: I was in a museum. I was going down some stairs to the zoo, which I thought wasn't particularly nice to the animals to never see sunlight, but since they were there anyway I wanted to see the zebra. I lost my way a bit so was trying doors at random. At this point I may or may not have been the Doctor. One of the doors I tried opened out onto the street, but it wasn't the street where the museum was located so I decided it was safest not to go through. Also I was still looking for the zoo. The other doors I tried were also portals into other parts of the city. (It was kind of European with cobblestones, but also kind of... heritagey, like it was staged for tourists maybe.) The last one I tried before the dream faded, there was a woman selling strawberry tarts and strawberry slushies and so forth, and I was trying to understand the money I had (coins shaped like pink foil pea-sized balls) in order to buy some.

Dream the second: I was a Princess on the run / in rebellion against my mother the Queen. (Ie, I was dreaming about my WIP. My WIP is set in Scandinavia, but for some reason whenever I dream about it, at least about the royalty part, it's set in Korea.) I had to get some allies who'd be loyal to me and not my mother, and my Korean isn't terribly good. With some thought I said to a bunch of people something that, upon analysing the grammar while awake, actually means "Is there anybody? To love me." A bunch of people followed me around a corner, at which point I stopped and asked, "Is there anybody? To love [my] mother." There was a certain case marker that I used this time, which I think symbolises my ongoing confusion about how one is meant to use that case marker. Anyway, having narrowed down who I could trust the dream continued with me going into a Bible study class and my sister was there and it started going incoherent and anyway I can't remember any more.

Speaking of the WIP, earlier this week I wrote 549 words of Mikkel talking with the Queen, and then I deleted them. And up through yesterday I wrote 411 words of Mikkel talking with the Queen's lady-in-waiting, and now I've deleted them. I'm planning now to write some number of words of Mikkel talking with the Queen and her lady-in-waiting, and with luck I won't delete them too.

There was the tide-coming-in dream, for when I was worried about deadlines, and there was the packing-anxiety dream, for when I was thinking of travelling somewhere that would require packing. (Actually travelling there was unnecessary: being homesick sufficed.) These have both trailed off because I rarely have deadlines these days and no longer travel much.

What I do do is work at the library until closing time on a Wednesday evening. Enter the library-closing-anxiety dream.

Basic plot: It's 9pm. I want to close the library and go home. But the students won't leave! Worse than that, they keep coming in!

Variations and elaborations:

• The first time I had this dream, the students were making sandwiches in a discussion room.
• The second-most-recent time, we were actually opening the library but the students were coming in before they were ready, and also our lending desk had been renovated into oblivion and the students kept coming into the staff-only area to take books off the shelves.
• Last night the students (instead of being merely oblivious to closing time as normal) actually had a reason for not leaving, to wit, they had assignments/exams the next morning, needed a place to study, and didn't see why I couldn't just go home and leave them in the building. They even went into the floors where we'd turned off the lights, apparently intending to study by streetlight or something. At 9:12 I decided to call Security but I kept losing my place in the list of phone numbers, and then when I found it, it was some formula that required multiplying one of the digits and I couldn't tell if I was meant to carry the one onto the next digit or just forget it.

I actually have an obscure fondness for the tide-coming-in-and-going-to-drown-me dreams, and the packing-anxiety dreams at least mean that yay, I'm travelling somewhere! But library-closing-anxiety dreams? Just Plain Annoying.

[I just arrived at work and asked my colleagues if they ever get this dream. "Every Sunday," says the one who closes on Sundays. "Every Tuesday," says the one who closes Tuesdays. Somehow I feel both reassured and depressed by the inevitability of it all.]