the dream of the Pee Sword

“When it is time for you to forge the Pee Sword, then you will make the Pee Sword”, she said.

And there it was, hanging off of my body, freshly crystallized in all its off-white, red, yellow, and black glory. If “glory” was the right word, it looked like it had been made by arranging a bunch of plastic Mardi Gras beads on a cookie sheet and half-melting them. I put it in my shirt pocket and narrated to myself: Someday, the Pee Sword would be “Stabber”. But right now it was just the Pee Sword.

 

(“Stabber” was not it’s actual name, I could not recall the name I gave it in the dream. It was one of those single-word names you give a Cool Magic Sword and it was not a bad choice. Much better than “Stabber” at least.)

 

Before that was a lot of wandering around tubes and watching turf battles in strange cities that I feel all added up to my dreaming self getting a status update from my immune system on how the tide is turning on this case of bronchitis I picked up this past week. There’s more in my paper dream journal but it’s all pretty boring compared to Forging The Pee Sword.

the dream of the airless room

Yesterday, Nick and I had brunch at a popular place with a slow cooking time. Our conversation while waiting for our food turned to our dreams. I noted that it seemed like I’d quit dreaming about my mother over the past couple years; there was a sort of acknowledgement from Dream-MJ that she was dead, and she’d quit coming around any more.

Last night, Dream Me found herself rummaging frantically around the house I grew up in to grab a few keepsakes before it was engulfed by some kind of Doom. She dig around the tiny place full of built-in shelves that my room was  in this dream, grabbing a few books. Then she went into the kitchen, which for some reason had little plastic cartoon figures sitting on every flat surface. None of them were the right one to grab. Maybe the right one would be in MJ’s room?

So there I was at the threshold of my mother’s room. Musty, weirdly lit, no sheets on the bare mattress. With a distinct sense that going in was a Bad Idea. But I stepped in anyway. And the air went from “musty” to “completely nonexistent”; my throat closed up and I started gasping for breath, the lights went out and I could just see a shimmering rainbow aura of me waving my hand in front of me as if I was trying to stir up the air.

And then I heard Nick behind me, asking if I was okay. And then I was awake with no lingering fear, and none of the disorientation I’d normally expect from a sudden transition like that.

When I went back to sleep, I spent some time trying to investigate the dream version of my childhood home. But all I could get was a black void. I dunno if that feels portentous or no.

the dream of too much light

I dreamt I was in a city, full of artificial sunlight. All day long, and all night long too. I was getting more and more tired and just couldn’t get any sleep because of this fake daylight.

Eventually the scene shifted and I stopped being tired. I think that’s a first, though. I’ve never been tired in my dreams before. I hope it doesn’t become a regular thing.

the dream of the extended count choculaverse

I dreamt that it had been announced that there was going to be a comic based on the monster cereals – Count Chocula/Frankenberry/etc. People had started posting weird takes on what they thought it would be; deliberately-ugly short nonsensical strips. Some of these were “going viral” online. The people actually doing the comic posted a plea to stop doing this and wait for the rich worldbuilding they were doing.

I managed to find a link to where the comic was being posted, but not promoted. It was a single panel strip, presented in the form of a VR scene of a fire hydrant with a sticker of the single panel on it. It was neither funny nor good.

the dream of the battered magical library

Tonight’s dream involved being in some stacks looking at a section of bookshelves full of Magical Books. Some of them were very badly abused, one had the lower third of its spine sticking out at an angle that makes awake me wonder how the lower third of the pages weren’t completely detached from the upper third.

I pulled out a copy of the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Someone had grabbed it by the back cover and tried to rip the whole cover off, but it still barely clung on to the front edge of the spine. Written in pencil on the layer of white paper still clinging to the glue was the name of the book, and an eye-in-pyramid happy face.

I said something about how much I missed having my own copy with my own marginal notes, which I’m pretty sure is not a thing I did in the copy I had. And then I spent a while browsing through a book of Recent Important Pop Artists that ranged from comics to someone who did prose pieces in the shape of continents, mostly Africa.

There was a long stairway to climb down and then I was awake.

the dream of my father for the first time in quite a while

I do not have the data to back this up at all but it feels like I kinda stopped dreaming for most of the Trump presidency. And now I have started dreaming again.

It was one of those dreams where my father was back and we were just not talking about where he went during the time he’d been “dead”. I haven’t had one of those in a long time; this time he looked like someone else entirely and we weren’t talking about that yet either. Doing some rough calculations, this new person looked about as old as someone who’d been born around the time Russell died, so that’s kinda interesting.

Then I decided to go hunt for breakfast and wound up dodging the line into some kind of restaurant that took people and sat them together in groups wholly unrelated to any social units they may have been in when they got in line and I just slunk out of that and was suddenly outside a casino or something and I pulled out my phone to figure out where I was and it wasn’t very helpful and then I woke up.Maybe I should go back to sleep.

the dream of the centipede ritual

This morning I woke up from a dream that Donald Tump was riding a giant centipede around the perimeter of the entire continental US as part of some magical ritual to claim the whole country. It was not pleasant.

Then we went to the computer repair shop to pick up Nick’s laptop and they said the SSD had stopped working when they put it back together. They’re gonna see if they can do anything with it and we’ll pick it up again tomorrow. In the meantime I pulled out the old Air and set up an account on it for him, so he can actually have the option to leave the apartment again.

I am still not entirely sure the tradeoff of Retina screen and a faster CPU versus the Air’s ability to spend a whole day out working on art without the battery getting anywhere near empty was a good one. Picking it up to start setting it up for him reminded me how incredibly light it feels, even without factoring in the fact that I’ve started habitually carrying the power brick around with the Pro…

the dream of some horrible shit

Dear brain why did you think it was a good idea to dream I was sharing a bed with John K. Uuugggghhhhh. The part where he was confessing his evil past and trying to drug me with big needles was not good either, even if I did get to have my hands around his throat and end up jamming those needles through his hand and into his face. Repeatedly. Which was both really horrible and kind of good.

The second part of the dream was no better. Okay the part about flying a nimble little X-Wing-ish craft out of the reach of some “T-wings” that had an attack involving trying to crush me with huge metal plate wings was kind of fun. But. After some other stuff I was running across a yard from an assassin, who had previously demonstrated his weapon: a small thrown object designed to look like some kind of clockwork hummingbird, with razor wings. He casually threw it as me. I batted it out of the air and felt my left hand get a little sliced; I then fell to the grass as he started to explain how he had anticipated how I’d react to that first attack, and… I lost the rest of it, only noting something about the blades being poisoned, as I tried to crush its body, only to watch it shift and blur into some kind of horrible hybrid of plant leaves with markings that looked like a squirrel, which started running at me… and then I lurched to the right and woke right the fuck up with “oh so that’s what an avern looks like” bouncing through my head.

I have nightmares where I get killed by weird alien plant weapons out of The Book Of The New Sun. 10/10 for style, brain, but negative six hundred for a dream where I had to literally yank myself away from the brink of death. None like that ever again please brain.

I need to pee.

two dream fragments

  1. I was reading some mystical philosophy kind of stuff. Supposedly it was by Beethoven. I was very definitely studying it, which is, to be quite honest, pretty foreign to my whole life. I’ve never been much for Studying in a formal fashion.
  2. The corner of Where Am I and How Did I Get Here. I was walking along reading a book on my phone and passed my destination. I looked up and saw a street sign that read “WHERE AM I”. What an odd name for a street, I thought. My phone’s screen was all smeared up, so I couldn’t use Maps to figure out where I was. I decided not to turn around and retrace my steps; I was curious as to where this oddly-named street would lead. Soon I’d gone through some sort of portal to another, utterly mundane world, and was in a van with some other people who were now also in the wrong world because of me doing this. There was a lot of traffic; driving was slow.

the dream of the very very abrupt ending

There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. There never was any wheelchair. Everyone on the bus chanted this as it whirled around me, flashing between being a bus full of tourists and… other things; brief, half-second glimpses of bright lights and carnivals and who knows what. And then they were holding me, a skull coming in towards the armpit of my lifted-up arm. And then with a twist and a thump I was AWAKE, lying there in my bed. None of the slow drifting-to-awareness of my normal waking up; it was like I just fell back into my body and there I was. I lay there slightly stunned for a moment*, then got up, put on my robe, and went to the kitchen, pretty much on autopilot. After a brief encounter with Nick (it’s a sunny day today! also the Northgate mall is turning into offices! also there is a section in its wikipedia page about terrorists and serial killers!), I picked up my phone. Not because I wanted to use it – but because I wanted to see if it still worked, because I have noted that whenever I pull it out in a dream, I always get a clunky substitute cobbled together out of 1990s tech. It was, indeed, an early-21st-century device that worked as expected, so I guess I’m really awake.

 

The wheelchair that wasn’t? Oh, that was from before. I was in a rainy parking lot, and watched a man push a wheelchair through it, and suddenly collapse; I helped him up, and he went to his friends without a word to me. And then the wheelchair was gone and I was on the bus and that’s where we came in, isn’t it?

 

Previously there had been a fairly coherent narrative where I was some other guy, who had traveled a long way to seek the advice of a very Vegas sort of mystic at some kind of convention; he was looking for help with an entity that had been connected to him for long enough that he’d bothered this mystic’s father for help, as well. He was rejected once more, and watched sadly as other people looking for advice were tapped to be in some sort of forming coven; he ended up in a brightly-lit store, watching these other people troop in and acquire flashy new Magic Wands. (Me? I thought. I don’t need one of their wands. I have my own. And there it was in my hand, the plastic one full of water and glitter that I’ve had iRL for several years.) It was kinda sad.

Before that there was a bunch of the usual dream nonsense about trying to use a bathroom that was ridiculously impractical. Usually that involves me trying to pee in a toilet that’s overflowing, or has been removed, or something; this time it was a taking a shower with a showerhead attached to the wall right next to the toilet. At least the showerhead was on a hose, so it was almost usable. Until the point where that wall and toilet were in the middle of a fast fashion shop in a mall and it seemed more appropriate to deal with buying my stuff and getting out. Very much routine Dream Problems.

 

But damn, that ending. Never woke up like that before, feeling like I just fell into my body with a thunk and woke all the way up in an instant.


* I may have felt compelled to do a quick banishing before getting up, it was that weird