I dreamed that I had been accepted into Harvard as a doctoral student in mathematics, and would be starting in the fall. In the mean time, I needed to complete a third year of university-level foreign language. They had a program where I could go to France and take third-year French, so I jumped on that opportunity.
So I went to France, and had started classes, but couldn't find the book the instructor recommended in the university book store. I thought his book might be one I already had from previous French studies, so I went back to the class to ask if my Vis-à-Vis book would be okay to use in the class, or if I needed to buy the book store's book, which looked different from what he'd shown us.
I couldn't find the professor, and since it had gotten dark, I decided to just go home and try again the next day. I was walking across the park when I found some children standing around a storm grate, fishing. I couldn't figure out where their parents were, but as I stood there chatting with them, they kept reeling in these half-decomposed fish carcasses. More and more children were walking up. I glanced over my shoulder to see where they were coming from, and Sherlock and Watson (Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman) were there. Sherlock said it was some sort of clue, look at the children's faces.
I turned back around, and saw that the faces of the children were turning a waxy, moldy, livid green. The texture was like half-withered leaves, with veins standing out, like their skin would crunch and crumble if touched. Sherlock said something was beginning to wake up in the castle, and we needed to investigate.
Sure enough, the water below the storm grate was flowing down from a nearby hill topped by a spectacularly turreted stone castle, falling into ruin. We climbed the hill and crawled through the rubble of its front gates to enter yard. The stone was a bluish-gray slate filmed here and there with dark patches of damp and bright patches of golden-green moss. In the moonlight it was a mass of shaddows. We split up to see if we could find the source of the trouble.
I walked through a vast stone hall, its floor littered with a tumble of stone and wooden tables and chairs. All around the sides of the hall staircases climbed and spiraled to different levels, cloistered corridors, towers and turrets. Bits of bright color flashed in the darkest corners, but when I tried to look into the shadows to see them more clearly, they were gone.
I found my way to a wide terrace overlooking the moat. As I gazed down, the sluggish, leaden water began to bubble here and there.
"Bubbles," Sherlock said behind my shoulder. I jumped and spun around, and he and Watson were there with me, looking down at the moat.
"'Bubbles,' what does that mean, 'Bubbles'?" Watson asked.
"Follow me," Sherlock replied. He turned on his heal, his dark great-coat flying out around him, and he began to run. Watson and I followed him.
We sped up stair cases, to the highest tower. We came out upon a landing overlooking a high courtyard, where the years seemed to have turned the paving stones to gravel. The gravel bulged and stirred ominously. A woman appeared, clinging to the wall on the other side of the courtyard. She was skeletal, with skin as green and waxy as the children in the park. She wore a red and purple and white harlequin's suit, and had flying, straw-like pale hair and deep circles around her blazing eyes. She began to laugh, saying it was too late to stop what was about to happen.
Giant fanged worms burst out of the gravel, their faceless heads writhing higher and higher, up toward the landing where we stood, and we scattered. I fled back into the stairwell, up, up, up to the top of the highest tower, then up again to the top of the small turret at its back. But there was nowhere to hide from the worms. They wound their way up the tower, up the turrent, and I dashed back into the darkened stairs and sped down to the hall.
The flashes of color resolved themselves into the skeleton woman's minions, thin as paper, but tough as horn, in purple and red, flapping and drifting down from the shadows to hold me. They could pin me against a wall. Their edges could cut and slice. But they could also be evaded. Then I found I could catch one from behind and roll it up into a sort of pointed lance, and it would be helpless in my hands. That tough lance could then be used to pierce and pin the others.
I began catching and rolling and pinning them to walls while I tried to find their queen. I figured she could probably be destroyed with one of those lances, too. And somehow I knew that if I destroyed her, the worms would die. I kept pouncing on the skinny minions and rolling up a lance, but others kept attacking and I had to use my lance before I found the queen.
Finally, up on the terrace above the moat, I found her, and I had a lance in hand. She was wheedling with Sherlock, telling him she'd call off her army if he'd consent to be her king. I was hiding in the shadows, waiting for my chance. The leaden waters bubbled below. A sickly looking moon shown through a rusty iron lattice, all that remained of what must have been glistening mullioned windows looking out over the water. Sherlock denied her, and demanded she release the children in the park from her spell, and she began to laugh. I spun to stab her with my lance, and then I woke up.
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Thursday, February 16, 2017
TBTT#25 May 2013 Weirdness, Part 1
May 15, 2013
Last night I dreamed I was a hawk. I was soaring over and through a forest in search of prey. It didn’t seem worth it to eat anything smaller than a pigeon, but I was really hoping for a pigeon shaped bird the size of a duck that I don’t think actually exists.
May 20, 2013
I dreamed last night that I was helping out with an event at a plantation home. My job was to haul everything out of every cabinet I could find and organize each cabinet's contents in rows from left to right and top to bottom based on the size of the object. I'm not sure HOW this was supposed to help, but that was my job. I woke up with my brain anxiously churning about objects out of order and piles of things like stock pots, red high heeled pumps, and binder clips coming out of cabinets in a white and gold-paneled drawing room.
May 21, 2013
I dreamed last night that I was a Mayfair, being haunted by Lasher. In my dream, Lasher briefly took on substance, and the appearance of my distantly Mayfair husband and was trying to strangle me, while I basically tried to fend him off with the force of my hateful thoughts. I was afraid to try to hurt him while he was corporeal because I didn't want him to learn how HE could hurt US. Somehow, also, my dream involved watching movie filming in which Robert Downey, Jr. was acting in a nude scene in which he was only covering most of his genitalia with a towel or rag. I was somewhat fascinated by this, but surprisingly unmoved. Then some tourists and I climbed up the craggy cliffs that the Marigny and Bywater were perched on. Up there somewhere a bunch of my friends were meeting, and I met up with my mom. We went shopping, and I wanted her to buy me a brown, faux mink coat I found. Then Emily texted me and asked if I thought orange roses and ornamental pitcher plants would be pretty flowers for us bridesmaids to carry in her vow renewal wedding ceremony.
Last night I dreamed I was a hawk. I was soaring over and through a forest in search of prey. It didn’t seem worth it to eat anything smaller than a pigeon, but I was really hoping for a pigeon shaped bird the size of a duck that I don’t think actually exists.
May 20, 2013
I dreamed last night that I was helping out with an event at a plantation home. My job was to haul everything out of every cabinet I could find and organize each cabinet's contents in rows from left to right and top to bottom based on the size of the object. I'm not sure HOW this was supposed to help, but that was my job. I woke up with my brain anxiously churning about objects out of order and piles of things like stock pots, red high heeled pumps, and binder clips coming out of cabinets in a white and gold-paneled drawing room.
May 21, 2013
I dreamed last night that I was a Mayfair, being haunted by Lasher. In my dream, Lasher briefly took on substance, and the appearance of my distantly Mayfair husband and was trying to strangle me, while I basically tried to fend him off with the force of my hateful thoughts. I was afraid to try to hurt him while he was corporeal because I didn't want him to learn how HE could hurt US. Somehow, also, my dream involved watching movie filming in which Robert Downey, Jr. was acting in a nude scene in which he was only covering most of his genitalia with a towel or rag. I was somewhat fascinated by this, but surprisingly unmoved. Then some tourists and I climbed up the craggy cliffs that the Marigny and Bywater were perched on. Up there somewhere a bunch of my friends were meeting, and I met up with my mom. We went shopping, and I wanted her to buy me a brown, faux mink coat I found. Then Emily texted me and asked if I thought orange roses and ornamental pitcher plants would be pretty flowers for us bridesmaids to carry in her vow renewal wedding ceremony.
Monday, February 6, 2017
A Magical Rescue Party ~ 2/6/2017
I dreamed I was in my last year of high school when I discovered I had magical powers. There was a particular elevator I'd walked past in my school for years without realizing not everyone could see it. One day I realized this, and found myself in a group of people who could seeing it, looking around carefully, pushing the call button, and hopping in.
We wanted to go all the way to the top, floor 34, but the elevator stopped at 17 and wouldn't go any further, so we got out. We found ourselves in a sort of foyer that was a veranda looking over a dazzling ocean view. A bunch of girls were gathered around because there was a school legend going around that if the scent of a newcomer immediately caught your attention, that meant you were destined to be together.
One really lovely girl, with dark hair, olive skin, large dark eyes, and a sultry pout, perked up as we got off the elevator. But when she tracked down the person she'd smelled, it was the thirteen-year-old boy that I'd taken under my wing and was now best friends with. He was pleased that he'd interested her, but pretty devastated when she was openly scornful and disappointed. I told him she was obviously a bitch, and would have some growing up to do before she was ready to be with someone awesome like him. None of the few guys standing around seemed to scent me, though another girl in our new group perked up at the same time as one young man, and they wandered off, happy to meet each other.
My thirteen-year-old friend and I went down from the entry way out onto the shore to explore the island. There were four or five large lagoons, each with a different sort of beach and different land and water activities going on. We were in a school for water and tree magic, and we got into swim suits and paddled out to find out what we should do. An older boy with dark red hair and slightly slanted brown eyes came to guide us through a lazy river sort of course, except the water was anything but lazy. It roiled and surged along its banks, and swimming it was just exhilarating!
Suddenly, my young friend was gone, and I realized he'd transformed into a small, twiggy creature with leaf-like hands. He was using these to paddle along, and our new acquaintance was worried he'd get swamped, but somehow I knew he'd be okay. That he was just now discovering his powers, and some day maybe he'd be a giant log to ride the rapids.
As night fell, I walked along the shore with my two friends, the younger one back in human form. The sky was soft as velvet, studded with gleaming diamond stars. The waves were like gauzy silk frosting the water below, and their sound was a lullaby. As the castle at the peak of the island went dark and they called us in, I stumbled down a sand bank and was delayed trying to climb back up. No one seemed to notice, and as everyone left me behind, the castle went dark. All but a baleful red light glaring out from one window high up on the roof.
I knew then that this was what had called me here. I sprang up the outside of the building and began climbing the leads, still warm from the newly set sun. I reached the window, and found myself looking into prison. There was a man, strong but bound and blindfolded, dejected, but still majestic, sitting in a faded, dusty throne. He looked like he had sat tied there for years, but still wept for his freedom and his wife.
She was nearby, though he didn't know it. He couldn't see her, and she couldn't call out to him, because she'd been frozen into marble stillness, a living statue, helpless, immobile, and asleep. As I looked at them, I knew. I knew that they were the rulers of this realm, a king and queen, captive here. And they were my parents. Someone here would be sure to find that out, if they didn't know already, so I could count on being in danger. But I couldn't leave. I had to free them.
Over the next few days I confided in the two people I trusted, and we kept our eyes open and our ears to the ground, trying to learn as much as we could about what was going on. We learned that the upper parts of the castle were reserved for the most talented students, those who had proven both their skill and their loyalty to the school. As they grew in their powers, they became almost like angels. As we watched each others' backs, we worked hard to rise up to that level, but somehow I never could manage to get ahead.
But my friends rose, and they kept quiet about our mutual devotion, but they never abandoned me. When they'd been at the penultimate level for a week, and the younger boy was ready to ascend, they came to me to tell me what we had to do.
The girl that had turned her nose up at him when he arrived had begun to show an interest as the brilliance of his talent became clear. She had snuck him up to her room a couple of times, and he had seen through doors that were quickly shut on him that to get into the top levels, you had to shrink to pixie size. This was something I could do, so we laid our plans.
On a night as warm and still as the night we'd arrived, with the same eerie and ominous red light shining from the prison window, I shrank down to a quarter of my usual size and joined the pixies in the uppermost halls of the castle. There was a stretch of roof I needed to get over to unlock the prison cell, but I knew that if I stepped on any of the ornaments that adorned the slates, I'd sound the alarm. A being had to be even smaller than pixie size, with just a particular ratio of weight and length and breadth and limbs. I figured out the math, then called my younger friend. He turned into his twig creature and was scampering through the maze of ornaments to the lock.
And then I woke up.
We wanted to go all the way to the top, floor 34, but the elevator stopped at 17 and wouldn't go any further, so we got out. We found ourselves in a sort of foyer that was a veranda looking over a dazzling ocean view. A bunch of girls were gathered around because there was a school legend going around that if the scent of a newcomer immediately caught your attention, that meant you were destined to be together.
One really lovely girl, with dark hair, olive skin, large dark eyes, and a sultry pout, perked up as we got off the elevator. But when she tracked down the person she'd smelled, it was the thirteen-year-old boy that I'd taken under my wing and was now best friends with. He was pleased that he'd interested her, but pretty devastated when she was openly scornful and disappointed. I told him she was obviously a bitch, and would have some growing up to do before she was ready to be with someone awesome like him. None of the few guys standing around seemed to scent me, though another girl in our new group perked up at the same time as one young man, and they wandered off, happy to meet each other.
My thirteen-year-old friend and I went down from the entry way out onto the shore to explore the island. There were four or five large lagoons, each with a different sort of beach and different land and water activities going on. We were in a school for water and tree magic, and we got into swim suits and paddled out to find out what we should do. An older boy with dark red hair and slightly slanted brown eyes came to guide us through a lazy river sort of course, except the water was anything but lazy. It roiled and surged along its banks, and swimming it was just exhilarating!
Suddenly, my young friend was gone, and I realized he'd transformed into a small, twiggy creature with leaf-like hands. He was using these to paddle along, and our new acquaintance was worried he'd get swamped, but somehow I knew he'd be okay. That he was just now discovering his powers, and some day maybe he'd be a giant log to ride the rapids.
As night fell, I walked along the shore with my two friends, the younger one back in human form. The sky was soft as velvet, studded with gleaming diamond stars. The waves were like gauzy silk frosting the water below, and their sound was a lullaby. As the castle at the peak of the island went dark and they called us in, I stumbled down a sand bank and was delayed trying to climb back up. No one seemed to notice, and as everyone left me behind, the castle went dark. All but a baleful red light glaring out from one window high up on the roof.
I knew then that this was what had called me here. I sprang up the outside of the building and began climbing the leads, still warm from the newly set sun. I reached the window, and found myself looking into prison. There was a man, strong but bound and blindfolded, dejected, but still majestic, sitting in a faded, dusty throne. He looked like he had sat tied there for years, but still wept for his freedom and his wife.
She was nearby, though he didn't know it. He couldn't see her, and she couldn't call out to him, because she'd been frozen into marble stillness, a living statue, helpless, immobile, and asleep. As I looked at them, I knew. I knew that they were the rulers of this realm, a king and queen, captive here. And they were my parents. Someone here would be sure to find that out, if they didn't know already, so I could count on being in danger. But I couldn't leave. I had to free them.
Over the next few days I confided in the two people I trusted, and we kept our eyes open and our ears to the ground, trying to learn as much as we could about what was going on. We learned that the upper parts of the castle were reserved for the most talented students, those who had proven both their skill and their loyalty to the school. As they grew in their powers, they became almost like angels. As we watched each others' backs, we worked hard to rise up to that level, but somehow I never could manage to get ahead.
But my friends rose, and they kept quiet about our mutual devotion, but they never abandoned me. When they'd been at the penultimate level for a week, and the younger boy was ready to ascend, they came to me to tell me what we had to do.
The girl that had turned her nose up at him when he arrived had begun to show an interest as the brilliance of his talent became clear. She had snuck him up to her room a couple of times, and he had seen through doors that were quickly shut on him that to get into the top levels, you had to shrink to pixie size. This was something I could do, so we laid our plans.
On a night as warm and still as the night we'd arrived, with the same eerie and ominous red light shining from the prison window, I shrank down to a quarter of my usual size and joined the pixies in the uppermost halls of the castle. There was a stretch of roof I needed to get over to unlock the prison cell, but I knew that if I stepped on any of the ornaments that adorned the slates, I'd sound the alarm. A being had to be even smaller than pixie size, with just a particular ratio of weight and length and breadth and limbs. I figured out the math, then called my younger friend. He turned into his twig creature and was scampering through the maze of ornaments to the lock.
And then I woke up.
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