Random Stuff, and a Handful of Dreams
May. 31st, 2005 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellyssianEvery day on the way to work, I drive by road signs for a place called Seemsville, and I've always wondered: if everything is as it seems, shouldn't they have called the place an Is-land?
Note to fellow drivers everywhere: when the fog is as thick as jellied brains - or thicker! - you should not consider headlights optional. Just a thought, and your mileage may vary (right up until your car becomes intimate with another car, anyway.)
Some odd dreams last night, so naturally, I'll discuss the one I had the night before last first. I think. Now I'm all confused.
In which I recommend that someone should read Charles DeLint, but for all the wrong reasons
Because I was completely brilliant, and did not jot down any notes, I misremember the setting save for the fact that it was mildly curious. I do remember that someone was talking about something (not vague at all, is it?), and that I thought they should read DeLint. That is actually something quite ordinary, something that I do quite often. However, in this case the reason I gave was that, since this was clearly an example taking place within a dream, and the aforementioned vague something had to do with dreaming, it would be apt to read DeLint, as he writes a lot about the dreamlands and what takes place within them. Of course, if I hadn't been sleeping at the time, I would have realized that Neil Gaiman would have been a more suitable author to suggest, as I was unquestionably referring to The Sandman and specific story arcs therein. Ah well, can't be right all the time.
And from last night
The one which will be compared to Harry Potter, or, if was released as a trilogy, The Lord of the Rings
The dream, of course, has no resemblance whatsoever with The Lord of the Rings (exactly like all the other books that are billed as the Second Coming of LotR), but it did feature a school of magic - although no names were mentioned (or, alternately, remembered) we shall call the place Hogwarts, a young hero (Harry seems a common name) & heroine (Hermione is unique enough for the purpose), a befuddled headmaster (Dumbledore is not a suitable name at all, and Gandalf is also right out - the man did not appear to have any shred of real power behind his bumbling; perhaps Fizban - minus the power of Paladine, of course - is a better choice), and an arch-villian (who is unnamed - basically because he/she wasn't identified yet) who steals three parts of some kind of mystical treasure.
Unfortunately, I remember little enough of the dream, although it covered the first hour or so of screen time, and expressed a lot of depth and an intruiging storyline (at least, I thought so, when the overly loud alarm went off and pulled me from it.) For the most part, my POV was that of Harry, at least insofar as I knew what he was thinking - the camera did not show exactly what he saw, and the dream was appropriately filmed from a variety of angles and views, all tastefully done.
The treasure itself had a kind of clue-card that showed it was all safe and sound, and as the Headmaster (really, it's probably simpler to stick with that) attempted to show Harry and Hermione that all was really well with the treasure, it slowly changed into coins, representative of the fact that whoever possessed it was in the process of selling it. Much "It can't be!" and so forth, and then *poof*, the three pieces disappeared off the radar, as it were.
The Headmaster then grabbed a crystal - which was somewhat reminiscent of a unicorn horn - and set it upon a wall of stones. He sprinkled some herbs upon it, made a few Top Sekrit gestures, and said a bunch of words in a Magical Language. The top of the stone wall became transparent, and it revealed a woman, who seemed to keep looking over her shoulder, handing three objects to someone just off the viewable area - which just goes to show, when it comes to stone walls, you can't have too much of a good thing, and if you try to save construction costs by shortening it a foot or so, your scrying results may not show as much as you might like. A rather cavernous voice (as all offscreen, ominous villainous voices should be) was offering thanks by berating the women for almost getting caught by two children (a preceding scene that did appear in the cut I dreamt, but, unfortunately, don't recall enough of to relate), and then, of course, realized that the transaction was being spied on.
With this, the Headmaster rushed off to another room, trying to gather things that might have allowed them to successfully retrieve the treasures (and greatly shorten the length of the story, of course) that any reasonable hedge-wizard would have add at hand to begin with. Harry did make attempts to end things, reaching through the stone wall, nearly grasping the thief, but the spell dissipated without the Headmaster there to keep it going.
There was a bit more in that scene, but the part I remember next - which, unfortunately, was just getting interesting when the aforementioned alarm went off - was through the POV of one of the teachers (and yes, one of the teachers was played by Alan Rickman, or his twin brother) who was accessing the magic time lock and preparing to leave the school to go recover the treasures. There was an interesting effect when the lock was triggered and all those (blissfully unaware) in the school grounds shifted and blurred.
CSI: Watertown
A quick story first, as background:
As children, I, my brother, and whoever else we could involve in it, played fairly extensive games of Cops n' Robbers or what have you in and around our neighborhood.
Of particular interest in this case is Our Yard, the Rented House (with the yard where the owner wanted to fill it with stones so she didn't have any maintenance, but instead let it grow to jungle proportions), Mary's Yard, and the Apartment Building. Ours was a corner lot; the Rented House was downhill from us on the major road, Mary's Yard was an oversized lot running from the sidestreet down along both Our Yard and the Rented House; both of which ended at a stone wall (what's with these stone walls? this one, however, was capped with cement) that ran along a service alley for the old brick Apartment Building. A higher cement wall began near the far edge of Mary's Yard, and continued on past the neighboring driveway beyond, but that doesn't really come into play here - just think about levels of walls, which, of course, become more complex in dream. Downhill from the Rented House, below the wall, and across the alley, was another low wall, that dropped into a tangled wooded courtyard. When I read of woods invading Tamson House, for some reason I picture this area (hey, if you're not sure of that reference, you should read this book by Charles DeLint...)
Anyway, these areas, and the rest of our neighborhood, became the setting for many a heist or valiant capture or general goofing off. One time, however, when I was in high school and allegedly should have outgrown such things, I relented to my brother and his friend, and I picked up the trusty cap gun and joined in a game for old times sake. Times being what they were becoming (and are now more so, no matter what certain girls in Toronto may think), I probably should not have been using such a realistic looking toy gun. I don't remember (hmmm... just like a dream...) if I was playing the part of the good guys (I think I was) or the bad, but I was crouching streetside - on the main street - with gun raised, looking down the alley way, covered by the dense shrubbery that started six or so feet below sidewalk level on the other side of the low wall. I then discovered that some detectives are very confident, even when they're approaching someone with a drawn gun and they're not sure if it's real or not.
I glanced from the alley way, where I expected the perps to appear, to the Uncle Buckesque Cadillac pulling up at the edge of the Rented House, about twenty feet away. A large guy in a brown trenchcoat - looking every bit like Jack Nicholson's pet cop in the Batman film. We had a nice conversation, and he inspected the gun and verified it was a toy (sold in the Ben Franklin down the street), and he said a lot about not being sure these days, and admired how realistic it looked, and advised me that maybe I shouldn't play such games. I didn't, after that, which is a good thing in several ways, not least of which is if it had happened a short time later, his gun(s) would have been drawn, if not blazing, prior to investigating what ever it was I might be carrying.
That event, I think, informed the dream, despite having happening around two decades ago.
In the dream we were suited up for SWAT work - all black, with white letters POLICE. I believe there were three of us: me, my brother, and Chris Rock in the comic relief role. It was dark, new folks (including a cute girl our age - which was just about 10 at the start of the dream) just moved into the Rented House. The light was on in the back room - in our house, it was an unheated "den", in the Rented House I believe they used it as an extra bedroom.
We ducked and rolled and so-forth, across the yard by the garage, to the cover of the yew right underneath the windows, which poured out light as only unshaded windows in newly-moved-into houses can. We paused a moment, then made it across the open stretch, and over the hedge into Mary's Yard.
Mary was your classic elderly Irishwoman, so naturally, her yard was transformed in the dream to have a very formal English garden with hedges and mazes and so forth. We proceeded to jump, hide, duck and weave, with me bringing up the rearguard, which allowed me to watch Chris serve his Function and trip and fall over every low hedge he tried to jump over. I should have noted that, perhaps due to the actual events noted above, we bemoaned the fact that we couldn't carry the assault rifles a real SWAT team would have had - we didn't want to push things to far.
We made our way down to the edge of Mary's Yard, hopped the wire fence, and jumped down the wall into the Apartment Building's alley. At this time, the area grew much larger, and much construction was taking place along the wall. There was also very suddenly a lot of foot traffic across the back of Mary's Yard, down steps where we had just jumped (which don't exist IRL), and down the alley, which became some kind of a mall, and was actually indoors. We explored as far as a Dentist office door, and then returned.
Chris went off on a quick scouting mission along the top of the wall, and I was left there with a co-worker - no longer my brother - who, instead of bearing POLICE in white text bore a black jacket with INDIANS FIRE COMPANY in a rather subdued red, with the Cleveland Indians logo on it. He was explaining it to one of the passers-by when suddenly, someone screamed. I ran back to the alley way, where people were making a large berth around the rather mutilated body of a woman. I sent my co-worker off to get Chris, and proceeded to secure the crime scene.
I began to find curiously sharpened sets of teeth all around the victim, and I was reminded of the foul grin of a dentist in a white coat who had bumped into me while my co-worker explained why a baseball team's logo was appropriate for a fire department. Picture Christopher Walken in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, put a lab coat on him, and you've got the dentist, more or less - head, of course, attached.
I, of course, was beginning to form a pretty good idea of exactly who had ripped the throat of the unidentified lady, and was gathering further clues - the teeth were turning to ice cubes and melting quickly. Film-noir lighting as I investigated a couple of doors - locked - that the trail of teeth led to. The identity of the victim was revealed - it was my co-worker's mom (although the part of my co-worker changed from one person to another - I guess that role was a bit like the drummer(s) in Spinal Tap), a person who, IRL, I have never met.
I also wasn't the one who identified her in the dream. The cute detective lady (did I mention, we were now adults? since the cute neighbor girl part of the dream passed, I suppose some kind of love interest had to come into the film) told me, as she helped secure the scene, complimenting me on my thorough work. I was amazed she didn't realize that I wasn't actually a cop. From the moment the body was discovered, I was worrying again about not having a gun. But, hey, she was a cute detective lady, so I led her down the alley-which-becomes-a-hallway, towards the dreaded Dentists Office door.
And then I woke up and took a drink of water. I did not, however, rinse and spit.
Note to fellow drivers everywhere: when the fog is as thick as jellied brains - or thicker! - you should not consider headlights optional. Just a thought, and your mileage may vary (right up until your car becomes intimate with another car, anyway.)
Some odd dreams last night, so naturally, I'll discuss the one I had the night before last first. I think. Now I'm all confused.
In which I recommend that someone should read Charles DeLint, but for all the wrong reasons
Because I was completely brilliant, and did not jot down any notes, I misremember the setting save for the fact that it was mildly curious. I do remember that someone was talking about something (not vague at all, is it?), and that I thought they should read DeLint. That is actually something quite ordinary, something that I do quite often. However, in this case the reason I gave was that, since this was clearly an example taking place within a dream, and the aforementioned vague something had to do with dreaming, it would be apt to read DeLint, as he writes a lot about the dreamlands and what takes place within them. Of course, if I hadn't been sleeping at the time, I would have realized that Neil Gaiman would have been a more suitable author to suggest, as I was unquestionably referring to The Sandman and specific story arcs therein. Ah well, can't be right all the time.
And from last night
The one which will be compared to Harry Potter, or, if was released as a trilogy, The Lord of the Rings
The dream, of course, has no resemblance whatsoever with The Lord of the Rings (exactly like all the other books that are billed as the Second Coming of LotR), but it did feature a school of magic - although no names were mentioned (or, alternately, remembered) we shall call the place Hogwarts, a young hero (Harry seems a common name) & heroine (Hermione is unique enough for the purpose), a befuddled headmaster (Dumbledore is not a suitable name at all, and Gandalf is also right out - the man did not appear to have any shred of real power behind his bumbling; perhaps Fizban - minus the power of Paladine, of course - is a better choice), and an arch-villian (who is unnamed - basically because he/she wasn't identified yet) who steals three parts of some kind of mystical treasure.
Unfortunately, I remember little enough of the dream, although it covered the first hour or so of screen time, and expressed a lot of depth and an intruiging storyline (at least, I thought so, when the overly loud alarm went off and pulled me from it.) For the most part, my POV was that of Harry, at least insofar as I knew what he was thinking - the camera did not show exactly what he saw, and the dream was appropriately filmed from a variety of angles and views, all tastefully done.
The treasure itself had a kind of clue-card that showed it was all safe and sound, and as the Headmaster (really, it's probably simpler to stick with that) attempted to show Harry and Hermione that all was really well with the treasure, it slowly changed into coins, representative of the fact that whoever possessed it was in the process of selling it. Much "It can't be!" and so forth, and then *poof*, the three pieces disappeared off the radar, as it were.
The Headmaster then grabbed a crystal - which was somewhat reminiscent of a unicorn horn - and set it upon a wall of stones. He sprinkled some herbs upon it, made a few Top Sekrit gestures, and said a bunch of words in a Magical Language. The top of the stone wall became transparent, and it revealed a woman, who seemed to keep looking over her shoulder, handing three objects to someone just off the viewable area - which just goes to show, when it comes to stone walls, you can't have too much of a good thing, and if you try to save construction costs by shortening it a foot or so, your scrying results may not show as much as you might like. A rather cavernous voice (as all offscreen, ominous villainous voices should be) was offering thanks by berating the women for almost getting caught by two children (a preceding scene that did appear in the cut I dreamt, but, unfortunately, don't recall enough of to relate), and then, of course, realized that the transaction was being spied on.
With this, the Headmaster rushed off to another room, trying to gather things that might have allowed them to successfully retrieve the treasures (and greatly shorten the length of the story, of course) that any reasonable hedge-wizard would have add at hand to begin with. Harry did make attempts to end things, reaching through the stone wall, nearly grasping the thief, but the spell dissipated without the Headmaster there to keep it going.
There was a bit more in that scene, but the part I remember next - which, unfortunately, was just getting interesting when the aforementioned alarm went off - was through the POV of one of the teachers (and yes, one of the teachers was played by Alan Rickman, or his twin brother) who was accessing the magic time lock and preparing to leave the school to go recover the treasures. There was an interesting effect when the lock was triggered and all those (blissfully unaware) in the school grounds shifted and blurred.
CSI: Watertown
A quick story first, as background:
As children, I, my brother, and whoever else we could involve in it, played fairly extensive games of Cops n' Robbers or what have you in and around our neighborhood.
Of particular interest in this case is Our Yard, the Rented House (with the yard where the owner wanted to fill it with stones so she didn't have any maintenance, but instead let it grow to jungle proportions), Mary's Yard, and the Apartment Building. Ours was a corner lot; the Rented House was downhill from us on the major road, Mary's Yard was an oversized lot running from the sidestreet down along both Our Yard and the Rented House; both of which ended at a stone wall (what's with these stone walls? this one, however, was capped with cement) that ran along a service alley for the old brick Apartment Building. A higher cement wall began near the far edge of Mary's Yard, and continued on past the neighboring driveway beyond, but that doesn't really come into play here - just think about levels of walls, which, of course, become more complex in dream. Downhill from the Rented House, below the wall, and across the alley, was another low wall, that dropped into a tangled wooded courtyard. When I read of woods invading Tamson House, for some reason I picture this area (hey, if you're not sure of that reference, you should read this book by Charles DeLint...)
Anyway, these areas, and the rest of our neighborhood, became the setting for many a heist or valiant capture or general goofing off. One time, however, when I was in high school and allegedly should have outgrown such things, I relented to my brother and his friend, and I picked up the trusty cap gun and joined in a game for old times sake. Times being what they were becoming (and are now more so, no matter what certain girls in Toronto may think), I probably should not have been using such a realistic looking toy gun. I don't remember (hmmm... just like a dream...) if I was playing the part of the good guys (I think I was) or the bad, but I was crouching streetside - on the main street - with gun raised, looking down the alley way, covered by the dense shrubbery that started six or so feet below sidewalk level on the other side of the low wall. I then discovered that some detectives are very confident, even when they're approaching someone with a drawn gun and they're not sure if it's real or not.
I glanced from the alley way, where I expected the perps to appear, to the Uncle Buckesque Cadillac pulling up at the edge of the Rented House, about twenty feet away. A large guy in a brown trenchcoat - looking every bit like Jack Nicholson's pet cop in the Batman film. We had a nice conversation, and he inspected the gun and verified it was a toy (sold in the Ben Franklin down the street), and he said a lot about not being sure these days, and admired how realistic it looked, and advised me that maybe I shouldn't play such games. I didn't, after that, which is a good thing in several ways, not least of which is if it had happened a short time later, his gun(s) would have been drawn, if not blazing, prior to investigating what ever it was I might be carrying.
That event, I think, informed the dream, despite having happening around two decades ago.
In the dream we were suited up for SWAT work - all black, with white letters POLICE. I believe there were three of us: me, my brother, and Chris Rock in the comic relief role. It was dark, new folks (including a cute girl our age - which was just about 10 at the start of the dream) just moved into the Rented House. The light was on in the back room - in our house, it was an unheated "den", in the Rented House I believe they used it as an extra bedroom.
We ducked and rolled and so-forth, across the yard by the garage, to the cover of the yew right underneath the windows, which poured out light as only unshaded windows in newly-moved-into houses can. We paused a moment, then made it across the open stretch, and over the hedge into Mary's Yard.
Mary was your classic elderly Irishwoman, so naturally, her yard was transformed in the dream to have a very formal English garden with hedges and mazes and so forth. We proceeded to jump, hide, duck and weave, with me bringing up the rearguard, which allowed me to watch Chris serve his Function and trip and fall over every low hedge he tried to jump over. I should have noted that, perhaps due to the actual events noted above, we bemoaned the fact that we couldn't carry the assault rifles a real SWAT team would have had - we didn't want to push things to far.
We made our way down to the edge of Mary's Yard, hopped the wire fence, and jumped down the wall into the Apartment Building's alley. At this time, the area grew much larger, and much construction was taking place along the wall. There was also very suddenly a lot of foot traffic across the back of Mary's Yard, down steps where we had just jumped (which don't exist IRL), and down the alley, which became some kind of a mall, and was actually indoors. We explored as far as a Dentist office door, and then returned.
Chris went off on a quick scouting mission along the top of the wall, and I was left there with a co-worker - no longer my brother - who, instead of bearing POLICE in white text bore a black jacket with INDIANS FIRE COMPANY in a rather subdued red, with the Cleveland Indians logo on it. He was explaining it to one of the passers-by when suddenly, someone screamed. I ran back to the alley way, where people were making a large berth around the rather mutilated body of a woman. I sent my co-worker off to get Chris, and proceeded to secure the crime scene.
I began to find curiously sharpened sets of teeth all around the victim, and I was reminded of the foul grin of a dentist in a white coat who had bumped into me while my co-worker explained why a baseball team's logo was appropriate for a fire department. Picture Christopher Walken in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, put a lab coat on him, and you've got the dentist, more or less - head, of course, attached.
I, of course, was beginning to form a pretty good idea of exactly who had ripped the throat of the unidentified lady, and was gathering further clues - the teeth were turning to ice cubes and melting quickly. Film-noir lighting as I investigated a couple of doors - locked - that the trail of teeth led to. The identity of the victim was revealed - it was my co-worker's mom (although the part of my co-worker changed from one person to another - I guess that role was a bit like the drummer(s) in Spinal Tap), a person who, IRL, I have never met.
I also wasn't the one who identified her in the dream. The cute detective lady (did I mention, we were now adults? since the cute neighbor girl part of the dream passed, I suppose some kind of love interest had to come into the film) told me, as she helped secure the scene, complimenting me on my thorough work. I was amazed she didn't realize that I wasn't actually a cop. From the moment the body was discovered, I was worrying again about not having a gun. But, hey, she was a cute detective lady, so I led her down the alley-which-becomes-a-hallway, towards the dreaded Dentists Office door.
And then I woke up and took a drink of water. I did not, however, rinse and spit.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-31 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-01 05:12 am (UTC)The person in the dream was relating some circumstances they had gone through, which were remarkably similar to circumstances in the DeLint book I suggested to her - it was only upon waking that I realized the similar story to the described events was actually part of The Sandman.
Which, of course, isn't to say that the person isn't Neil Gaiman's most adoring fan - never can tell with the folks you meet in your dreams.