Do you know what happens when you spend the night watching Cromartie Highschool and reading Clark Ashton Smith stories? You have the following dream.

In this dream, my grandmother was an evil sorceress of some form, gradually overwhelming the inhabitants of a town populated mostly by mods on scooters. She had constructed armoured power stations in corner shops throughout the city, from which ectoplasmic tentacles were capable of launching with devastating strength and accuracy.

I myself was one of the scooter-riding mods destined to overthrow my grandmother's tyranny. One of my allies was Freddy Mercury, as portrayed in Cromartie Highschool. He rode a horse. Freddy was galloping through the forest when he found himself seized by a great and terrible force. This force lifted him bodily through the air and cast him into the snow-covered chasm to which my grandmother had retreated. It looked sort of like something out of Metroid Prime.

Freddy rolled down the slopes, causing a sort of snowball effect. He ricocheted from side to side, tumbling down trapped in the slush, until he found himself seized by ice-blue tentacles. In the side of the chasm a demonic face had formed itself out of the tumbling avalanche of snow. It was a projection of my Grandmother's monstrous thaumaturgy, at once separate and a part of her. Tentacles like those of a catfish flickered around its mouth. And Freddy Mercury and his horse were slowly drawn in under the cascade of snow to a fate too terrible to describe.

That part was far scarier in the dream than it sounds.

Later on the rebel alliance managed to blow-up the louver-covered power-station milk-bars with particle cannons and defeat the sorceress, who by this point had ceased to have anything to do with my Grandmother. Then we had a caucus and I was giver an alarming quantity of homework after offering to mix together various single-track recordings of all the different speakers into a single coherent audio file for archival purposes. Later I went bowling, forgot my shoes, and discovered I hadn't been wearing any pants. So I went back to my house in the French quarter of Melbourne and arranged to move-out. When I got to the place I was going for my interview, I found it to be next door to a lot containing hundreds of ambulances. Before I went indoors I discovered, once more, that I had forgotten my pants. Gradually, new layers of clothing (first boxer shorts, then a pair of purple taffeta trousers which materialised underneath my boxer shorts) clued me in to the fact that I was in a dream, and I forced myself to wake-up so as to avoid the problems of house-hunting, pantlessness and homework.

And that is that.

In other news, Spring in Melbourne is the best season. Everything is dark and damp and overcast. The storms aren't as good as those in Queensland, though.

Tags: dreams
Current Location: my comfortable bed.
Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Bjork - The Dull Flame of Desire

The dream which I had this morning was Alarmingly Vivid. It involved rats who were also woodsmen! And a bunch of really creepy fairies that goot ticked-off and demanded to be called elves. They were running a tourism business charging $150 just to walk to the waterfalls! Bastards!

Anyway since this is the internet I am obliged to relay it in minute detail. Here is what I wrote in my note-book after waking-up and going "Hey, this might make a cool YA (Young Adult) novel!".

It all centred around the rivalry between two woodsmen rats - Laszlo, never seen by anyone, who lives in the ridges and protects the woodland creatures from the villainous hunter rat whose name I didn't catch, so we'll call him Roland.

A massive oak falls down in the forest and Roland comes riding alond its trunk, pursuing a hart. The hart flees up into the ridges and canyons and Roland chases it. However Laszlo soon tricks him amidst the tangles of vines that hang from the lips of the gorges, and uses his tail as a false vine, so that Roland, hunting his enemy out of frustration, falls from the ridges and barely survives, having to use a lasso to catch hold of a crag in freefall and being thrown into a chute. The chute carries him back towards the forest.

Meanwhile a family - a mother, two aunts, grandmother, a woman who is the mother's friend, a little girl, grown son and daughter in her late teens - are staying in a cottage in the forest. They used to come all the time when the young man was a boy, but haven't had the time to do so for years. The house is now almost derelict and the woods have become dark and suspicious, although still beautiful.

When the boy was young he met and played with the daughter of a family of faeries that lived in the spring nearby, and after a while he fell in love with her and promised to marry her. But now things have changed and the faeries have become possessive and bitter. They exact tithes from visitors for going through their land and won't let certain people go certain places, The son still loves Phora, but she has succumbed to the general character of her family.

Eventually the fairies send the trees and the sylphs to knock-down the cottage and destroy the family, but the mother knows what to do and has everyone sit in a circle and play steel flutes and riddle. For some reason the Aunt is bound in her chair and has her mouth gagged.

All this works, and the faeries are beaten back for the time being.

This was the point when the first part actually happened, but I'm rearranging things to make more sense narratively.

I figure that the adventures of Roland and the family run parallel, and that the family finds Roland after the night attack by the trees (this is why the tree fell-over - it was weakened during the march and couldn't hold itself up once the faeries stopped animating it). Roland passes himself off as someone pleasant - possibly as Laszlo - and tries to use the mother's knowledge of witchcraft to gain an upper hand over the faeries and exact his revenge on Laszlo by being able to circumvent the other rat's traps.

You have no idea how cool the faeries look. Or the scene with the vines, which was like something out of a Paolo Serpiri comic. I've got homework but I'm going to draw pictures. I still remember the topography to I may make a map.

Tags: dreams
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Air - Talkie Walkie

    I've often been struck by how my face never seems to stay the same. I'm sure other people have this problem too, and that to everyone else I look as consistent in my appearance as they do to me, but it remains irritating that I constantly shift-about in my perceptions of myself like a series of not-quite-identical twin brothers.
   
    I think this is the clearest evidence of why the "Residual Self-Image" thingy in The Matrix was quite ridiculous. Really, the whole film/series was quite ridiculous, but in reality Neo and his cohorts would have shown-up as a bunch of shifting impressions. This is why I could never film a dream - I'd keep making everything blurry and trying to only have a coherent image in the point of jumble which the character was looking at, and as a result people who are used to being able to glance around the whole screen would get fed-up with me.

    Oh wait, D.W. Griffiths beat me to it.

    I still haven't done any of my DSO postings. It's 11:17 AM and the library shuts at 10 PM, so I'd better get to it. I want to finish by five, go to the super market and start a painting.

    A woman working in the cafe called me "Captain Snooze". I woke-up at 8:00 today, of my own volition. Perhaps it had something to do with the weird  dream in which my mother was trying to shanghai me into touring as a band to make her money.

Tags: d.w. griffiths, dreams, faces, the matrix
Current Location: Splitsville
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Dead Can Dance - Everything