I was in the bottom floor of a high-security building. Maybe a mall, maybe some kind of Le Corbusieresque arcology. But the cyborg zombies had gotten in and infected the staff. Me and the rest of the party with the Eleventh Doctor were immune, but the cyborg zombies had us outnumbered.

It should be noted that these were very intelligent for zombies; they could talk just fine and didn’t have parts rotting off or anything. But their flesh had gone grey, and they had bits of metal festooning and controlling them. Basically the Borg I guess? Except all kind of sneeringly malign. And with a wider variety of clothes.

A little earlier, I’d walked right into this with another woman. Not like we really had a choice; we were surrounded and herded in to where the other uninfected people were. Nobody told us where to go once we were in, so we kept walking down the wide corridor, hoping to make it to a corner and vanish. Walking so as not to attract attention was excruciatingly tense, but we made it – and there was the stairs AND an elevator! The other woman hopped into the elevator, but I was too slow. Then there were a couple scenes of her pushing the highest button available (29 I think, though I knew the building was MUCH higher – I guess there was a sky lobby up there or something), and then it being explained by the Doctor that sadly she only had papers authorizing her to go up to floor 4. This would result in her being reconstituted from her DNA records when she got to her destination floor, and sadly, the records of her had her infected with the cyborg zombie disease. Good thing for me I was too slow to catch the elevator, I guess!

I’m not sure why I didn’t take the stairs. I guess the cyborg zombies caught me, and politely escorted me over to where the Doctor was being kept.

When the fat male cyborg zombie who was keeping me down on the floor started leching on me, I got pissed. Cyborg zombies, sure, I could handle that, but forced cyborg zombie sex? NO WAY. So I turned to the female cyborg zombie in a fake nurse’s outfit (she’d been working at a theatre whose uniforms had that vibe) and pulled out a weapon I didn’t know I had on me. It was a small blade on an extending pole, and it slid unerringly into her mouth, buzzsawing it’s way through the metal flaps at the back, and into her brain. Sawblade mandibles sprouted from the sides of her mouth as I did this, but my weapon was too fast – she was dead before she could get them into my hands.

The male cyborg zombie looked at me sadly, and gouged the tops of my feet open with his own razor-sized vibrating blades. It didn’t hurt. I suspect it would have soon. But then I woke up with my ankles crossed and slightly complaining about this.

Tonight: a long dream about… a long quest, I think.

We’d walked through the mirrors into a room. We knew how to get out: just walk through a mirror into room 15. Except the mirrors would change, and would reflect the wrong rooms. We were trapped in this room until we figured out how to get out.

Eventually I did: I drew a schematic for an organic gun, with 15 written backwards. Then the mirror just showed room 15 while reflecting that, and my companions and me could step through it to continue on our quest. Which was coming full circle since we were entering the part of the corridor that had water falling from the ceiling; we were hauling a hose up, to pump water out when we got to the proper room in the corridor not too far above. Someone explained this to me, that the audience might know (as it had been a long time since the beginning of the story), but I knew this already.

There was a lot more before and some after but it’s fading.

So instead here’s one from the night before that won’t fade.

There is a plush dragon that sits atop a hanging light fixture in my studio. His name is Gravity, and he watches the studio to keep it real when I’m not around. This is entirely a joke, not an actual intended majgickqhawockqalghl function. He also has an understudy, an orange plush triceratops named Sylvia. She sits on my bureau, doing the same for my bedroom. Both of them have this quizzical look to them, with their heads tilted perpetually to one side. Gravity’s made of bronzeish fake fur, with golden wings and underbelly – very much a metallic kind of dragon.

Gravity had been falling from his perch for a couple days, so I decided that he must want a sabbatical. I put him in the bedroom, and put Sylvia in the studio. She ended up sitting by the window on my bike’s seat, because she wouldn’t fit on the light. Unsurprising, it’s not like triceratopseri are known for their flying.

With my comedy plush guardians of reality thus rearranged, I went to sleep.

And dreamed. I was out there in the studio, lit by the moonlight. I didn’t have my glasses on. Sylvia was where I’d put her, but she was made of flesh, and just sitting there quivering fearfully. Obviously she was not ready for this; I’d have to put Gravity back on the job. So I picked her up, petting her behind her shield (which was unaccountably floppy) and set out for my bedroom. Halfway there, I felt something pulling me back to where I keep the watching plush in the studio; I ended up on the ground, crawling, to get enough purchase against this force. I picked up Gravity from Sylvia’s usual spot, put her there, and went back out to put Gravity where he belongs.

I bumbled around in the dark. There was now a table in there with something on it, which i knocked over as I tried to get Gravity up on the light. Then I turned it on and discovered that the walls in this corner were covered with hordes of action figures, all held to the wall by little clamps. It’s like they were on display. The table had a bunch of sculptures of dragons, some of which I’d knocked over.

Gravity was now for some reason on the end of a long, stiff pole, held up by wire. If there was enough room I could have swung him around in big circles, making him “fly”. I tried in the limited space I had available, making him do a bit of a curve around, then a downwards loop over the table. Maybe I was trying to do a downwards Immleman. I lost control, and he fell onto the table; when I lifted the pole, I got a new plush dragon. This one was black, with lots of sequins on its body to make it gleam.

Then I woke up (fully, not a dream “waking”), pulled on my robe, and picked up Gravity. He sat comfortably atop the light fixture the first time I tried putting him there. (It’s a shade hanging from the ceiling, so it’s slanted. Sometimes he slips off, sometimes he gets knocked off by a careless hand whilst putting on a coat.) I took Sylvia, put her back in her usual place, and went back to sleep.

I don’t think I’ve EVER needed my glasses in a dream before.

—-

Other fragments, meanwhile, from tonight’s dream.

I was sitting in a room talking with a man I did not entirely trust. He had a mirror universe goatee. Outside was blurry, but dark and rainy. I was verbally fencing with him about some kind of deal, and taking occasional notes in super-shaky penmanship with a pen that was running low on ink. Then he left to deal with something, and I was staring at a book, trying to memorize the first page – but I woke up, and it evaporated within seconds.

There was something about a book in last night’s dream too, in fact. After the black sequin dragon, as I was coming up into consciousness. With a complex sigil in the lower left I was trying to make sense of and a place for me to sign. Which I didn’t. I’m glad to know that dream-me isn’t making any contracts for me!

There was a large room with a corridor running in a circle around it. Two ten foot tall people in fursuits were in it; they’d sewn them together at the back so there were one four-legged, two-headed Janus-beast. Which was a parody of a sequence earlier in the dream where there was a similar situation with a monster that looked somewhat like that.

I was in a wheelchair? I think? There was a sensation of moving while sitting, at least. Going counterclockwise around the corridor, trying to lure the people playing the part of this monster, just as I’d lured the real one earlier. Then it cross faded into me going in a circle around some tables floating in darkness – clockwise this time – and looping past a woman taking notes and arranging cards. I dropped a card from the man with the goatee onto her desk, and moved some of the other ones around. I really have to wonder if this is related to me doing Nanowrimo, what with a lot of Drowning City existing on index cards.

Also there is someone playing a flute somewhere outside. Or listening to music involving a flute. At 2:30 in the morning.