Stargazing Festivals Are a Lot of Work ~ 1/27/2016

I dreamed my friend Kerri and I were in a fabric store. We were planning on making hourglass hijabs to wear as we watched the rising of Rigel, the end star in Ursa Major, which would be peaking over the horizon to the far north tonight. I wanted to buy a very special fabric for the floor-length head cover, and I saw so many beautiful patterns. There was a deep blueish-gray silk with fans and flowers embroidered on it in shades of red from dark crimson to bright cherry to a pink that was almost white. There was a light synthetic patterned in geometric splashes of black and gold and deep green. There were colors of the rainbow in every weight and texture.

I finally settled on a very special bolt that was printed with blue sky above a desertscape in gold and rust and sage green, with silken fringe along the bottom, threaded through polished oak beads. I thought it might be too long, since I'm not that tall, but I knew I could trim the long fringe. But when the proprietress brought it down and began to unwind the three yards I needed, we could see that beneath the first wrapped layer, the top edge of blue sky had been eaten away by moths or time. I was very disappointed, because it was really that blue sky that did it for me.

So Kerri and I went with some pinstriped navy lightweight denim, with broad bands of navy ribbon and lace for the ties and trimming. The proprietress offered to also make the hijabs for us, if we'd wait, so we decided to do that. While I was waiting, I went to examine a selection of fantasy steampunk ready-made outfits. There were corsets and cloaks and dresses and tunics. I found and fell in love with a heavy hooded cloak in silvery blue-gray silk-wool blend. I thought about buying it, but I was already spending more than I really wanted to on the hijab, so I let it be.

I left the fabric store because I had somewhere I needed to be. Kerri said she'd keep waiting, and we'd meet up later. I went to my high school gym just in time for a volleyball game with some of the folks I'd gone to school with. I did fine as long as I was serving and playing in the back court, but when I rotated up front, I couldn't hit anything to save my life. Eventually, I rotated out and set to work sewing letter and number patches onto my friends' jackets. I'd cut the patches myself, out of felt, and they looked very professional. Another guy I'd gone to school with came in, and the patches on his shoulders looked like they'd been a kindergarten class project. They were also pale peachy-orange, instead of the deep, bright orange they were supposed to be. I offered to redo them for him, but he said, maybe later, and went down to the gym floor with the rest.

They'd taken the volleyball net away, and were rehearsing for a sort of performance. Some of the guys were doing acrobatic flips across the floor, some of the men and women had formed a hip hop dance troop, and one guy was playing this coordination game with a group of women where he waved his hands in intricate patterns, and they had to try to anticipate his motions and stay as in sync with him as they could.

I finished my patching and left the jackets in a neat stack, because it was time to meet up with Erik and Kerri and the boys. Kerri waved me over to one of the turrets that stood at each corner of the gym, with circular stairs that lead up to each level of the stands, and some abandoned hotel rooms along the top. The door was very low. We always called them hobbit doors. I crept through, then started up the stairs. I met them up in the top room, and asked if there was a restroom up here, because I needed to go before we headed out. Kerri smiled ruefully, and said no, the restroom was back at the bottom, so we'd stop there on our way out. We all began circling back down the stairs, and then I woke up.

TBTT#15 Odds and Ends from Autumn 2012

October 17, 2012

I need a better happy place, cuz my subconscious ain't it. Dreams that people are trying to shoot me because I witnessed a crime have me wondering how secure my apartment really is...

September 14, 2012

I dreamed that I was adopted, and I resembled my dad because I was actually the illegitimate daughter of his illegitimate brother. Having lost my dad and wanting a father figure, I went looking for this birth father, and was told that when I graduated college and defeated a certain video game, I'd gain information how to get in touch. Graduating college was the easy part. I finally beat the game, and went where I was supposed to go, and I had to dig through two feet of spider webs in an old chimney tile out on the front porch of the house I grew up in, to find a letter that basically said, "Congrats, keep up the good work."

September 4, 2012

Okay, subconscious, I get it. We have issues. But four nights running you've had us dreaming we can't sleep because we're fleeing from people who want to kill us. This is unacceptable, and as an aside, after last night's variation of left my wallet at a bus stop, had to go back, then couldn't find my hotel room, I want to kill you, too.

August 20, 2012

I had a dream last night that I met another Laura Berwick. Only she wrote her last name with the traditional Welsh spelling, "Bcgcick." No, I DON'T have any idea where my brain gets this stuff.

(And by the by, brain, Berwick is a SCOTTISH name. WTF???)

Local Color ~ 1/20/2016

I dreamed I was translating an ancient folk story that had been recorded in Spanish. It was an assignment for the Spanish class I was taking, that was taught by the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. The tale was about a Native American warrior who came into town to be a matador. The story beautifully and poetically described his proud posture as he rode his horse into town, and the amazement and admiration of the townspeople as his buckskins fell away to reveal the tight, ornate matador garb beneath.

The story went on to describe how after the first bull fight, there was a performance, where the most beautiful young girl in the town told a story, the wisest matron in the town told a story, and the oldest man in the town told a story, before the next bull fight began. After we finished our translations, we were going to go to a reenactment of the tale, that was held every year in a small Mexican town.

We all set to work on our translations. the first word that gave me trouble was "osage", which I took to mean that the young warrior was of the Osage tribe. This didn't make sense to me, because I thought the Osage ranged farther north. Ree looked over my page while I was pondering, and explained that "osage" was a generic word for the young, indigenous warriors, not a specific tribe in the Spanish. Others of my classmates were translating it as "savage," but I didn't like that. I settled on  warrior, for the time being.

Suddenly I looked up, and all my classmates were done and packing up to go, and I had only finished the first paragraph. But I knew that they had all basically just written down literal translations, and the imagery and language was so beautiful that I was working hard to find an echo of it in my English. I finally finished and went to the festival, but I'd missed the first bull fight. Honestly, I wasn't too broken up about that. But I found the festival in complete chaos.

The woman reenacting the part of wise matron was actually a young, single woman, who was jealous that she hadn't been picked as most beautiful girl in the town. The man playing oldest man was actually not that old, but he was the wise-matron actress's father, and they were sabotaging the event out of jealousy. He was running around harassing the lovely young woman's suitors, and she had turned herself into a mouse and recruited other mice to run around pestering people, climbing up pants legs, devouring festival treats.

I helped the folks trying to bring everything under control, and I personally killed the very last mouse by decapitating it with a red rubber spatula. That mouse turned out to be the jealous woman, and when she died, she and her father both just evaporated, and everything went back to normal. So then I went on a cruise with my family, and had this whole thing where I couldn't take a shower because people kept trying to barge into my stateroom's bathroom, and then I woke up.

Regency Vampires ~ 1/13/2016

I dreamed I was in a sort of Jane Austen novel setting. I was close to a family of three sisters, and we'd all been invited to a house party at the estate of a famous but very reclusive baron. The oldest sister was just out of mourning for her dead fiance, and still grieved for him, but the other two girls were excited about the possibility of meeting potential husbands.

Upon exploring the grounds around the manor, I discovered a lovely cottage where an eccentric old woman lived. She was kind of a regency Joan Rivers. She had some familial connection with the Baron, but she never spoke of it. She didn't go visiting, but was pretty friend and effusive when I met her and went to see her, bringing my friends. We all liked her very much.

The middle sister was the prettiest, and she got a lot of attention, but soon she seemed to really hit it off with a tall, slim young man with curly, light brown hair. They sat beside each other and talked for hours. They danced together as much as propriety allowed. We all knew it was just a matter of time before he asked her father for her hand, but her father had developed a severe dislike of the young man, and no one, not even he, could quite say why. His wife scolded him, and encouraged her daughter, because really the young man seemed so nice, and he was certainly wealthy.

Slowly, though, the oldest sister began to be suspicious, too. One evening she told us that the madwoman in the cottage had given her a secret device to take into the ball room that night. When the switch was flipped, the room would go dark, and if any evil lurked in the room, it would glow white and be revealed for what it was. We thought it was all a huge joke, but that it would be lots of fun to plunge the room into darkness.

So after dinner, as the musicians were warming up to begin playing the dance, we all glanced around at each other, looked over to the oldest sister, and nodded. She flipped a switch and everything went dark.

Except for the Baron, our host. Except for the middle sister's new suitor. And except for half of the young men in the room. These all glowed with an unearthly, sickly pallor, lips black, faces gaunt and haunted, and teeth lengthened into fangs. They were all vampires, and they knew what we had done. All the humans in the room began to scream and scramble for doors and windows, and we scattered across the grounds, into the night.

I was holed up with the middle and youngest sisters and their parents in a cave on the edge of a river that ran through the Baron's park lands. We were all weeping because the oldest sister was missing, and because the middle one was so heartbroken. We were glad she was safe from whatever horrible fate might have lain in store for her, but it was so awful to know that the man she was falling in love with wasn't a man at all.

We heard a scuffling at the back of the cave, and an opening gaped in what we had thought were solid stone walls. The Baron and his bloodthirsty minions began to stalk in, and we prepared to fight. Suddenly, there was a small flash of light, and one of the vampires shattered like glass. Then another, then another. We gazed to the mouth of the cave, and there stood the madwoman, but she was transformed into a radiant being cloaked in shimmering white, and she held a lantern that flashed out beams of sunlight that shattered the undead like dropped crystal.

Around her stood half a dozen other women, of all shapes and ages, with similar lanterns. Slowly, their newest recruit came forward. It was the oldest sister, her short auburn hair brushed thick and smooth around her head, hooded and gowned in glistening deep green. With her lantern she personally shattered the man who had threatened her sister, then the Baron and the Madwoman stood face to face. They were brother and sister, we could all see it now, and she wept at the thought of destroying him, but he was the last left of his hellish brood.

Suddenly, as they stared at each other, each grabbed onto the other's shoulder and they rushed out into the night, and presumably had their to-the-death standoff somewhere else. Neither was ever seen or heard from again. The oldest sister traveled around the country with the other women, hunting and destroying vampires wherever they found them, and the middle sister took her heartbreak overseas to the new world, where she began an American chapter of the League of Light. And then I woke up.

Fragments Can Be Just As Crazy ~ 1/7/2016

I dreamed my friend Kerri and I were walking through a field, discussing edible plants in the wild. I actually got Kerri to eat a leaf of wild mint, even though she detests most vegetables.

Then I was in a hall of Elvi. There were buttons on the walls, and when you pushed them, one of the animatronic Elvises would light up, move around, and sing an Elvis song. There was also an Austin Powers animatronic thrown in for some reason.

That's all I remember.

My Work with the FBI, the King, and Some Incompetent Pastry Chefs ~ 1/4/2015

I dreamed I was working with Fox Mulder on a case that looked like possession. Ordinary people would suddenly form a pack to do horrible things to others, then eventually turn on each other, and even themselves. In a trance I watched from within one of the possessed. I couldn't feel an additional presence, only the man's own horror at what he was doing as he helped his pack tear a woman limb from limb with their bare hands, and finally his utter terror as against his will he broke the window of the office building they were in and leaped out from the 34th floor. I was with him as he fell to his death.

Mulder and I located the office building and went to investigate the scene. The conference room we investigated was full of light and had an amazing view, but was in chaos, littered with overturned furniture and broken glass, and spattered with blood. Mulder went to the window to look out, then shouted to me to follow him, and we ran out of the room. As he had looked down, he had witnessed an attack. He said it had something to do with a young woman picking up a necklace.

By the time we got to the new crime scene, everyone had scattered, but Mulder traced the girl to a local university. We caught up with her and four other students in a dorm room. They were deciding how best to destroy the building. They turned to attack us, but Mulder tore a necklace off the neck of the blonde girl he'd seen downtown, and threw it out the window. Suddenly, the five students came to themselves, afraid and confused.

It turned out the necklace itself was possessed and cursed. It would infect people and take over their wills in a very specific way. It was perfectly safe to handle, until the person holding it was in a room with or within arm's reach of exactly four other people. If the person with the necklace touched one of those people, the magic in the necklace would be triggered, and the five people would become possessed.

Mulder and I collected the necklace from the bushes outside the dorm, and set off to transport it to a vault in the FBI buildings. We decided to walk, since that would give us the most control over our surroundings. I stayed behind him, out of arm's reach, and scanned the walkways  ahead of and around us, making sure we avoided clusters of three or four people. Eventually this drove us to the edge of a river, with cold, slate-gray water roiling on one side, and the silver ghosts of a dead forest on the other, under a dreary sky of clouds.

Up ahead, I caught sight of a group of travelers in dark cloaks. There were a man, an elf, and four hobbits. This gave me an idea. I called out to them, and they paused, waiting for us to catch them up. I explained our situation, and how traveling close to their group would help keep things safe, and they allowed us to join them.

As we trekked down river, they refused to tell us where they were going, or why they were traveling together, but they spoke of a powerful king whom they expected to join them soon. They thought maybe he would know how to nullify the evil magic of the necklace. They warned us that he was watching over their party from far away, until he was free to join them, so if we did them any harm, he would see and punish us.

We had many adventures, and became friends in a week or so. I decided that once Mulder had the necklace secure, I would join their company and help them on their secret quest, even if they never told me what it was. Then, one day, as we were deciding if we should set up camp early, arrows came at us from all directions out of the forest. Mulder and the four hobbits were driven off to one side, and Mulder was about to stumble right into the nearest hobbit. I could see the fear on his face at the knowledge that the evil magic was about to overtake him, when a tall, strong man with long dark hair streaked with silver appeared out of nowhere, reached out, and prevented Mulder's fall. The hail of arrows ceased, and we could hear the sound of our hidden foes scuttling away through the dry undergrowth.

Our fellow travelers all fell to their knees as the newcomer lead Mulder and the hobbits back to our group. This was their king, of course, and his magic had stricken our enemies with fear and cloaked us from their sight as soon as he'd arrived. The other man in the party turned to Mulder and I with distrust, and voiced his suspicions that we had let the enemy know where the party was, somehow. But the king assured them all that we weren't spies or traitors. As he stood with us, the forest filled with golden sunlight, and began to leaf and bloom. He plucked a brilliant orange bud from a flowering vine, caught a hummingbird out of the air, and fashioned them into a living ring, which he placed on my finger as a token of his friendship with us. He took the evil necklace, glistening richly with fine gold chain and subtle gems in the glimmering light. He crushed it in his hand, and the light went out of it. The necklace crumbled to dust beneath our feet.

The king then reminded me that it was time I got back home, because the school year would be starting up again in a few days. I hurried home after that, and found my friends and my little sister looking for the official calendars for our school start times, and trying to make pies by flattening the crust in a pasta roller. They had enough crust for the three pies, but one guy had taken some of it to build steps for his gingerbread replica of our school, and another had tried to line three pie dishes with uneven strips, running them in circles around the edges of the pie plate, then trying to cover the centers of the pans with more scraps. It was a mess.

I gathered all the scattered bits of pie crust, kneaded them all back into a ball, divided that into three balls, and began to roll them out. We were almost ready to put pie crusts into three pie pans when I woke up.