I dreamed.

It started out as a web series. A man with an usual hobby: there were a few abandoned underground installations nearby. He would find his way in, go to the bottom, then challenge himself to find his way back up without ever using stairs/elevators/etc – he was constantly cutting his way through the ceilings, MacGyvering solutions up. Lots of first-person views with narration over it. Lots of cameras dropped here and there to watch him doing stuff.

Then the plot thickened. There were old experiments in there. Changed humans. Who wanted out, who wanted things he'd found. Just one or two or three. All fast, each deadlier than the last. He was hunted through the place, having to take them out one by one.

Until he defeated the last one in a way that had him and the last experiment thrown into a parallel world. An industrialized world, full of city, full of highways, where he knew nothing of the language. He had a moment of realization when he saw the same word on a packet of snacks and on a truck; he followed the truck and discovered the snacks were some kind of curled potato snack, began to decipher the language. Hid the envelope full of Dark Secrets (which may have been slightly malignly sentient?) from the underground installation's depths in the back of a file cabinet in the trucking office, while befriending the truckers and learning the language.

Then there were other shenanigans in this parallel world. The whole place felt vaguely run-down; not quite post-holocaust but post-something. A little post-communist Russia, perhaps. Standing on a rarely-used freeway overpass, throwing fireworks at soldiers who were firing back with live weapons, because he was just supremely devil-may-care and wanted to impress some gang of juvenile delinquents. Getting chased by some pack of semi-tribal lunatics, caught, and thrown into a weird death trap of some sort of little sprawling complex of asbestos-lined rooms they were ritually setting on fire, that was hung far off the ground. He managed to escape by finding a place it was *just* close enough to the massive pile of mattresses? part of it was hanging near, and sliding out of one of the many mockingly large windows in it. (There was something about how this death trap was designed as a huge instrument, where his agonized dying screams would mix with the air pulled through by the flames to create music, as would his screams if he chose to leap from its large windows to certain death below.) The people who'd put him in there gave chase, he avoided/killed most of them, and then was caught by a last few. Apparently he'd blinded one, and their code demanded that he must now serve as that one's eyes… he was being dragged off to further adventures as I woke up. And what about the nemesis from the underground complex this started in, who may have been thrown into this parallel Highway Exchange World with him?

How would he get home? Because clearly he would, the whole thing was told as first-person narration. Well, maybe I'll find out in some other dream.

“I have an adorable secret to tell you. You're brave.”

That's what the wizened matronly mentor figure told her young charge before I woke up. Said young woman was holding a naked sword in a large hall in an old mansion, waiting for the villainess who had been waiting for the whole season's length to show up for a long-promised duel with our heroine.

Right now the big bad was monologing. And nobody was really listening to her. At any moment she was going to get pissed off and start striking out with her firey body, mostly at our heroine. Who was standing there with a dumb grin as her sphinx mentor told her that secret.

A little earlier our heroine had been watching a couple of her housemates get drunk with some absurd pump/straw contraption hidden in the hilt of a sword. There were a bunch of half-monsters and magical people living in an old mansion, you see. And there were Halloween party shenanigans going on when the omens finally came together and the big bad came out of her room down the hall with doom on her mind. She had a grudge against our heroine but I don't remember why.

There was another dangling plot hook that might have been a factor in this fight: a magician forgotten in his room, busily doing a bunch of Western hermetic tradition majgick to Immanentize The Estachion. Which is something only our heroine knew was his goal, without knowing the significance of that phrase (basically, “make the apocalypse happen”). I thought that was going to come to a head at some point but evidently we got this other hanging plot hook first.

Also she was not entirely a magical person; there had been some stuff earlier with her pointing guns at people and losing one to a grumpy, very floofy black and white cat. The guns were weird little folding things that were improbably compact and had safeties that could pick multiple modes. Probably some high tech or magical multi-weapon, I guess. But she didn't have one handy. I guess this is where the cat that grabbed her gun in its mouth, got its head stuck in a box, and vanished, was going to reappear at a climactic moment.

She'd been living in a sort of igloo made from flattened cardboard boxes, in the middle of a room. Probably a library, I want to say, though I'm not sure why.

The whole story (which felt like highlights from a whole season's worth of character-establishing meandering) had taken place mostly in a huge pile of an old mansion. Not quite Gormenghast levels of Giant Crumbling Gothic Pile, but it probably filled a significant chunk of a city block. Everyone felt like they were college age, there's a good chance it was a frat house – well, or white, given that it was mixed gender. Maybe it was at a Magical School taking place in House Fuck You I'm A Dragon, I dunno. (Motto: Efutue; sum draco.) I'm pretty sure I could turn this dream into a show pitch with a few week's work…

Anyway. “I have an adorable secret to tell you. You're brave,” said the sphinx lady to the young heroine. Freeze frame, cross-dissolve to a messy painting of the scene. Cliffhanger for the next episode full of Exciting Fight, because that's where I woke up.

I gotta pee.

Well. That sure was a dream about my mother.

There was something about being in a remote wooded area with Jennie and playing some sort of game that involved breathplay. I was all, hey make sure there are scissors handy before I stick this noose on me, okay?

And then I was in a car with my mother driving around familiar parts of New Orleans. She was wearing one of the dark blue dresses I think she had for pretty much my entire life and used for slouching around the house. We talked some. And I was basically saying, I love you and I miss you, but you hanging around is just not helping me at all. I cried a lot. She was also really not driving very well; she was kind of worried when I pointed out that she was endangering me with all this bumping over curbs and nearly hitting phone poles and not paying attention to the other traffic.

And then we were on the Interstate and took a wrong turn and ended up jumping a ramp over the Superdome. I got to look down and see it passing below us. We stuck the landing, too. I do not know why the highways in dream New Orleans contain a ramp you can jump the Superdome with, but apparently they do. A moment after I was kind of annoyed we hadn’t had the sense to get out after landing and commemorate this rare occurrence with a photo.

Then I woke up, crying a lot.

I remember that not long after my father died, my mother told me she dreamed of riding a roller coaster with him. Somehow this puts me in mind of that.

Fuck mortality. I miss her.

Well that was a stress dream.

I was supposed to be traveling. But I hadn't packed. So I had to do it at the last minute. And then I missed my flight. And kinda blew that off and went on a quest through an unfamiliar city for a restaurant with my phone failing to give me useful maps. And people failing to give me helpful directions. Then I ended up in a little weirdly-laid-out ramshackle house renting a room for the night. And started dropping bags and having stuff go everywhere. And then my iPad was chock full of malware and wasn't even turning off properly when I tried to reset it because ads were popping up instead. Oh and also there was a barely understandable phone call from an Australian person I was apparently supposed to be sharing a hotel room with who I was of course not there to pay for what with missing my plane.

I crawled onto the bed with Nick to try and destress by hugging him and he poked me in the forehead with a mechanical pencil when we tried. Put that away and I cuddled him and bawled like a baby.

And then I woke up.

I wonder if this is related to the fact that I have four weekends in a row coming up with some kind of convention stuff happening on each of them. I'm not looking forwards to flying to DC, coming back and visiting the airport for a couple panels, flying out to SF, then doing a con here in the city. Quite possibly. I'm not looking forwards to those weeks and will be pretty wiped out after them. Need to plan my cons better next year.

There may be other factors, too. It's getting colder at night which always means bad dreams for me until I adjust the temperature of the bedroom. And of course my mom is still dead. I had a moment not too long before going to bed last night where that thought sprawled across my mind and I just kinda sighed.

Well that was NOT A GOOD DREAM. I was lying in a small room in a resort somewhere trying to cope with my mom having just died, and Nick having died a couple of days later. I went outside and was informed by Jason that MJ’s funeral was that afternoon. And I knew that I’d shortly have to go to Nick’s funeral too.

Then I woke up and was very very glad that was not the case. Nick has really been a big help in me staying sane through this.