Last night I dreamed I had to free-hand draw a map of North America, and I was having the most trouble with the Great Lakes, but I did a good enough job to win the competition, and my prize was an all-expense-paid gold prospecting trip to Alaska. On the contest website, you could go and browse all the available locations to do this, and after looking through everything (the flash interface was pretty slick), I decided that, as I was going in the summer, I would visit the northernmost option.
The countryside was gorgeous. Vast green rolling plains shading up into slate-gray mountains in the low slanting gold of the sun. I arrived at my lodgings to find I had a quite comfortable private room and bath in a large log cabin that was furnished like an old family farmhouse. Everything was serviceable and cozy, and nothing matched anything else. I was sharing the cabin with a couple of men, a family of four, the caretaker, and, at least when I got there, two grizzly bear cubs. We were pretty concerned about evicting the cubs before mama showed up and decided we wanted to keep them.
After that was taken care of, I was given the goody bags to pass out, but the only representatives of the family of four that I could find were their two little boys, so I had to explain to the boys that they needed to *share* these bags with their family, and until their mom and dad came back, they could each have ONE candy. ONE. Fortunately they were very well behaved little boys. They went on their way and I started to collect a few extra blankets for my bed, in case I got cold overnight.
At this point, the cabin caretaker came into my room stoned and, while he completely ignored me, he was acting SUPER creepy, so I got one of the guys to come and help me shove him out (he was HUGE), and then help me remake the bed because he left a big old sweat stain from his drippy hair. Anyhow, we got all that taken care of, and set off in an antique train to the gold-mining site to start panning. And I'll never know if there was gold in them thar hills (though everyone kept saying exactly that), because then I woke up.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Thursday, October 20, 2016
TBTT#23 The Game ~ 3/29/2013
TBTT#23 The Game ~ 3/29/2013
I dreamed last night that I was staying at the foot of a mountain at some sort of educational camp with an assortment of friends and family. Late one night I felt a call and began climbing the mountain. As the sun rose, I found myself in a winding, ice-filled cleft, all around me blanketed in snow, except the path beneath my feet, which was pebbled with lapis lazuli, aquamarine, and piercingly blue chunks of glacial ice. The path wound out of the cleft, up along the ice-draped shoulders of the highest peak, at times no more than a slender ribbon of loose blue scree edging out over sheer drops into frozen valleys hundreds of feet below. I slid and skittered down five feet for every ten that I climbed, but I kept going.
I reached the summit at mid day and found an ancient altar, sheltered on one side by one last upthrown spar of granite just under twice my height. On the altar lay a sword of gleaming steel, shining bright as polished glass in the midday sun. As I grasped the hilt and raised the sword, a friend appeared over a ridge across from me, then another to my left, another and another until five of us stood in that high place, and each had faced their darkest fears in the climb, and each found their weapons of horn and iron and ebony, one a bow and arrows, another a long hafted axe. There was a dagger and a tall, barbed pike.
An old man, bent and bearded, appeared behind the altar, telling us of the enemy we had been brought to face. It would appear to each of us, he said, once as our dearest friend, once as our darkest nightmare, until each of us had wounded it and thrown it down twice. Then it would arise one final time.
The old man disappeared as we heard the scrabbling clatter of someone new climbing up the last slope. A woman appeared over the ridge, and the girl on my right choked back a gasping sob, ran to her, then dodged back to avoid raking claws, black and sharp as obsidian, as the woman's hands lashes out at her. The girl grabbed the outflung arm and raked it elbow to risk with her dagger, then flung the monster over a cliff.
As we heard it clawing it's way back up, we arrayed ourselves around the altar, one atop the highest ledge, one beneath the altar itself. I found an open space on the other side of the outcrop, where I could see the monster coming and keep the rock at my back, it came to each of us twice, and we fought it off and threw it down. When it came the tenth time, for the man with the long pike, it wounded him, and he died even as it fell.
The archer above me caught the pike as the dagger girl tossed it to him, then spun and hurled it at the enormous gray dragon that flapped up before me, with eyes like sapphire, spewing freezing flames the color of the walls of a glacial crevasse. I darted beneath it and grasped the pike, where it was lodged in the dragon's belly. Holding myself there beneath the beast, and twisting the pike deeper in, I hacked at it with my sword.
As it began to crumple to the ground, I wrenched the pike loose with my left hand, then darted out from under it. I hooked the base of its head with the barb of the pike, drawing it down and stretching its neck. I raised the sword in my right hand and brought it smashing down again and again. I almost had its head off when it reared back with the last of its strength, its back full of black arrows. The pike jerked in my hand, but I clung to it, stumbling forward. Then, grasping the pike again more firmly and crossing my right arm over, I jerked the pike from its neck, and with a backhanded slash, finally severed its head.
The five of us trudged back down the mountain, and helped the school janitor fix a broken toilet before washing up for dinner. Then I woke up.
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Zombies on Everest ~ 10/4/2016
I dreamed I was visiting Everest. There was a train up to the top. It stopped at Base Camp, Stone Camp, and the abandoned power plant perched on a stream near the summit.The view was pretty amazing from up there, but the building was just a damp, old concrete block of a place. Off to the south side of the mountain was a much nicer building: the temple of Ulan Batoor. It's spire was a high, slightly bulging cone with stone traceries running in tiers around its circumference, from base to tip. The whole thing was covered in green moss, and was very picturesque against the snows of the higher peaks.
To come down from the temple to the coast, you could walk along more paths, or you could ride a T-lift. I chose the lift, but I must not have tucked my camera snuggly enough in my pocket, because when the lift sped around a turn, flinging all of us like a roller coaster ride, my camera went flying to the rocks below. I was so sad, because, while I hadn't taken many pictures of Everest yet, since I wanted to get an overview before I started shooting, there were a lot of photos from earlier in the trip that I hadn't saved to my computer yet.
I decided to walk back up to where the lift track bent around overhead and see if I could find my camera and at least salvage the SD card. As I began hiking up the path, I noticed several groups of people coming down, and I wondered if maybe someone had found my camera and would be bringing it down to show around. Sure enough, as I passed a couple of guys, I caught the flash of red metal in one of their hands, and asked them if that was a camera they'd found, and told them it was mine. I had a momentary fear they'd ask me for some proof of that, but they handed it over without question. I did check to see if I could see any recent photos, and sure enough, I was able to power it up and it was, indeed, my camera.
But even though it turned on, it didn't work quite right. It was zoomed way in, and wouldn't zoom back out, and while I could scroll (zoomed in) among photos I'd taken, and see through the view finder, I could no longer actually take pictures, no matter how hard I pressed the button. So I decided I needed to continue on up to the temple and see if they sold cameras in the gift shop.
The gift shop was tucked into one wing of the enormous temple, all cold gray stone beneath its blanket of moss. Pressed up against one window, amid a ceiling high pile of rubbish, I could see a decaying torso of a man with a narrow face, short, medium-brown hair, and blue eyes filming over. He looked familiar, and I thought it might have been the clerk from the gift shop up at the peak. Other than that, I didn't think much of it.
Inside the walls were whitewashed and the floor was brown tile and the gift shop shelves were pretty bare. But they did have a modest selection of cameras. One was the size and shape of a mid-line DSLR, and I thought maybe this was my chance to upgrade from my point-and-shoot, but when the clerk handed it to me, I swear it weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. I said it was way too heavy, and my friend Kerri pointed out that it was much bigger than what I was used to, so of course it would feel heavy. So I handed it to her, and she said, oh, no, no way, I was right.
The next selection was right in my price range, but I wasn't sure. It was one of those skinny, flat, rectangular cameras like the one I had when I was little, and it took real film and flash cubes, and I wasn't really interested in going back to that era, after getting used to digital. I finally decided on a small, copper colored point-and-shoot that had most of the features I was used to, though since it was so cheap, I didn't have high hopes for its durability or reliability. Still, I really needed something to get me through the trip.
As I was ringing up, the brown-haired, blue-eyed clerk came in and began talking to the Chinese clerk who was checking me out. It was the same guy I'd seen rotting as a torso in the window, and he didn't look all that great ambulatory, either. I decided that the temple, and maybe the whole Everest complex, was being taken over by zombies, and me and my friends should quietly make our way out of there and get home as fast as we could. The big black dog in the corner seemed to think that was an excellent idea, and he'd rather like to come home with us. Then I woke up.
To come down from the temple to the coast, you could walk along more paths, or you could ride a T-lift. I chose the lift, but I must not have tucked my camera snuggly enough in my pocket, because when the lift sped around a turn, flinging all of us like a roller coaster ride, my camera went flying to the rocks below. I was so sad, because, while I hadn't taken many pictures of Everest yet, since I wanted to get an overview before I started shooting, there were a lot of photos from earlier in the trip that I hadn't saved to my computer yet.
I decided to walk back up to where the lift track bent around overhead and see if I could find my camera and at least salvage the SD card. As I began hiking up the path, I noticed several groups of people coming down, and I wondered if maybe someone had found my camera and would be bringing it down to show around. Sure enough, as I passed a couple of guys, I caught the flash of red metal in one of their hands, and asked them if that was a camera they'd found, and told them it was mine. I had a momentary fear they'd ask me for some proof of that, but they handed it over without question. I did check to see if I could see any recent photos, and sure enough, I was able to power it up and it was, indeed, my camera.
But even though it turned on, it didn't work quite right. It was zoomed way in, and wouldn't zoom back out, and while I could scroll (zoomed in) among photos I'd taken, and see through the view finder, I could no longer actually take pictures, no matter how hard I pressed the button. So I decided I needed to continue on up to the temple and see if they sold cameras in the gift shop.
The gift shop was tucked into one wing of the enormous temple, all cold gray stone beneath its blanket of moss. Pressed up against one window, amid a ceiling high pile of rubbish, I could see a decaying torso of a man with a narrow face, short, medium-brown hair, and blue eyes filming over. He looked familiar, and I thought it might have been the clerk from the gift shop up at the peak. Other than that, I didn't think much of it.
Inside the walls were whitewashed and the floor was brown tile and the gift shop shelves were pretty bare. But they did have a modest selection of cameras. One was the size and shape of a mid-line DSLR, and I thought maybe this was my chance to upgrade from my point-and-shoot, but when the clerk handed it to me, I swear it weighed fifteen or twenty pounds. I said it was way too heavy, and my friend Kerri pointed out that it was much bigger than what I was used to, so of course it would feel heavy. So I handed it to her, and she said, oh, no, no way, I was right.
The next selection was right in my price range, but I wasn't sure. It was one of those skinny, flat, rectangular cameras like the one I had when I was little, and it took real film and flash cubes, and I wasn't really interested in going back to that era, after getting used to digital. I finally decided on a small, copper colored point-and-shoot that had most of the features I was used to, though since it was so cheap, I didn't have high hopes for its durability or reliability. Still, I really needed something to get me through the trip.
As I was ringing up, the brown-haired, blue-eyed clerk came in and began talking to the Chinese clerk who was checking me out. It was the same guy I'd seen rotting as a torso in the window, and he didn't look all that great ambulatory, either. I decided that the temple, and maybe the whole Everest complex, was being taken over by zombies, and me and my friends should quietly make our way out of there and get home as fast as we could. The big black dog in the corner seemed to think that was an excellent idea, and he'd rather like to come home with us. Then I woke up.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
TBTT#22 Unconventional Transport
I dreamed I was trying to get back to new orleans from my grandmother's house by harnessing a wild rabbit, encased in a giant glass butter dish, and having it pull my bicycle. But my umbrella wouldn't work. The white rabbit kept trying to run down into the gully. I had better luck with the brown one.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Ocean Depths to Office Space to Outer Space ~ 9/10/2016
I dreamed I went diving on this special reef where you could collect pet sea animals. I came back up to the surface with a dish full of golden yellow and bright orange brittle stars, one fish shaped like an angel fish, but bright, fiery amber, and a six inch tall rag doll that was really a mermaid under a spell.
I traveled home through a series of quaint British villages, and as I went, I learned the mermaid's story. She had fallen in love with a human, decades ago, and come up onto land to woo him. But she'd been pursued by a dirty old man who tried to rape her. Someone had transformed her into a tiny doll just in time. The man had thrown her into the ocean, and until she could find the person who could change her back, she was stuck.
I got my dish of sea life home, but I noticed the brittle stars were having to crouch tensely to stay under water, and even then their bristles poked up into the air a little. I needed to hurry up and get them a bigger aquarium of salt water as quick as I could. So I hurried to the post office, where at least I could buy sea salt, so I could replace some of the sea water I'd lost. But all I had was a $20 bill, and they refused to take anything larger than a $10, or credit cards. I yelled at them about how ridiculous that was for a bit, then hurried to the beach shop down the street.
The beach shop took credit cards and sold sea salt, which was good. I realized, after poking around a little, that they also sold aquariums and small animal cages. I started looking around, and kept finding tanks that were *almost* what I was looking for, but not quite. I finally asked for help, and was shown several aquariums that were the size I wanted, but not suitable for salt water. It took way too long, but I did eventually buy a suitable aquarium. I got the other chemicals I'd need to treat the water with and some gravel for the bottom, and went home.
I got the tank set up, with a layer of snapped green beans on the bottom, then a layer of gravel, then the salt water. I treated the water with the chemicals, and had to wait a bit. But before I could put the fish in, I noticed the bottom-most green beans had turned black, with a delicate layer of white mold, so I had to empty everything out and start over. By the time I got the fish, the brittle stars, and the rag doll mermaid setup and comfortable in the tank, I was running late for work.
I got myself to New Orleans, and had been working in the office for a couple of weeks, when I was told that the next Friday would be my last day. I was pretty upset, because I'd bought a car and taken an apartment just to come work in New Orleans. I left work early that day, and headed to a pub for a cider. Two women passed me, headed for the same pub. The taller one was a beautiful Indian woman wearing a dress of rich, stiffened, deep teal wool. The dress hugged her figure, all the way down her arms, up her neck, over her hips and down to her calves, before belling out to a two-foot circle around her ankles. Her hair was in a sleek, long, thick braid down her back, and she wore enormous gold hoop earrings.
The other woman was a pale-skinned, dark-haired, Russian woman with jade green eyes. She wore a mauve silk sari with a rosy mantilla of sheer silk around her arms and up to the top of her head. The mantilla was edged with gold, and her hair was piled up on her head, held in place by golden combs. This woman held the pub door open for me, and we all recognized each other. The two of them had been interns the summer before, and were working for Shell again this summer. They insisted I join them at their table for my drink, and we talked over the current business situation, and my layoff.
On my last day in the New Orleans office, I went to the cafeteria for lunch, and spotted a college friend I hadn't seen in years. I called out his old nickname, and he turned around surprised. I wanted to ask him how he'd gone from a free spirit in the peace corps to a starched white shirt and khakis, but I didn't get a chance. He immediately started reminiscing about the a cappella group we'd been in, and insisted we sing our arrangement of Billy Joel's "Lullaby". So we began to sing, and I actually remembered the whole thing.
Suddenly, it seemed like he'd received some sort of signal. He perked up, began to look around, then told me to come with him. We left the cafeteria, and outside the sky was black and the stars were out, and above us hovered a Firefly class spaceship. He'd been its captain for years, and the crew was calling him back. He invited me to go with them, and of course I accepted. We flew up and away from earth, and as we went deeper and deeper into space, the emergency he'd been called to help with became apparent.
When we turned on the exterior lights, we could see that an enormous space parasite had latched onto the ship. It was shaped like a big, flat pill bug, and was an orangey, mustardy yellow with green fronds all around it's edge. Somehow it had been invisible in earth's atmosphere, but had survived landing and take off, and creatures like it were latching themselves onto space ships all through that quadrant of the galaxy. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when I woke up.
I traveled home through a series of quaint British villages, and as I went, I learned the mermaid's story. She had fallen in love with a human, decades ago, and come up onto land to woo him. But she'd been pursued by a dirty old man who tried to rape her. Someone had transformed her into a tiny doll just in time. The man had thrown her into the ocean, and until she could find the person who could change her back, she was stuck.
I got my dish of sea life home, but I noticed the brittle stars were having to crouch tensely to stay under water, and even then their bristles poked up into the air a little. I needed to hurry up and get them a bigger aquarium of salt water as quick as I could. So I hurried to the post office, where at least I could buy sea salt, so I could replace some of the sea water I'd lost. But all I had was a $20 bill, and they refused to take anything larger than a $10, or credit cards. I yelled at them about how ridiculous that was for a bit, then hurried to the beach shop down the street.
The beach shop took credit cards and sold sea salt, which was good. I realized, after poking around a little, that they also sold aquariums and small animal cages. I started looking around, and kept finding tanks that were *almost* what I was looking for, but not quite. I finally asked for help, and was shown several aquariums that were the size I wanted, but not suitable for salt water. It took way too long, but I did eventually buy a suitable aquarium. I got the other chemicals I'd need to treat the water with and some gravel for the bottom, and went home.
I got the tank set up, with a layer of snapped green beans on the bottom, then a layer of gravel, then the salt water. I treated the water with the chemicals, and had to wait a bit. But before I could put the fish in, I noticed the bottom-most green beans had turned black, with a delicate layer of white mold, so I had to empty everything out and start over. By the time I got the fish, the brittle stars, and the rag doll mermaid setup and comfortable in the tank, I was running late for work.
I got myself to New Orleans, and had been working in the office for a couple of weeks, when I was told that the next Friday would be my last day. I was pretty upset, because I'd bought a car and taken an apartment just to come work in New Orleans. I left work early that day, and headed to a pub for a cider. Two women passed me, headed for the same pub. The taller one was a beautiful Indian woman wearing a dress of rich, stiffened, deep teal wool. The dress hugged her figure, all the way down her arms, up her neck, over her hips and down to her calves, before belling out to a two-foot circle around her ankles. Her hair was in a sleek, long, thick braid down her back, and she wore enormous gold hoop earrings.
The other woman was a pale-skinned, dark-haired, Russian woman with jade green eyes. She wore a mauve silk sari with a rosy mantilla of sheer silk around her arms and up to the top of her head. The mantilla was edged with gold, and her hair was piled up on her head, held in place by golden combs. This woman held the pub door open for me, and we all recognized each other. The two of them had been interns the summer before, and were working for Shell again this summer. They insisted I join them at their table for my drink, and we talked over the current business situation, and my layoff.
On my last day in the New Orleans office, I went to the cafeteria for lunch, and spotted a college friend I hadn't seen in years. I called out his old nickname, and he turned around surprised. I wanted to ask him how he'd gone from a free spirit in the peace corps to a starched white shirt and khakis, but I didn't get a chance. He immediately started reminiscing about the a cappella group we'd been in, and insisted we sing our arrangement of Billy Joel's "Lullaby". So we began to sing, and I actually remembered the whole thing.
Suddenly, it seemed like he'd received some sort of signal. He perked up, began to look around, then told me to come with him. We left the cafeteria, and outside the sky was black and the stars were out, and above us hovered a Firefly class spaceship. He'd been its captain for years, and the crew was calling him back. He invited me to go with them, and of course I accepted. We flew up and away from earth, and as we went deeper and deeper into space, the emergency he'd been called to help with became apparent.
When we turned on the exterior lights, we could see that an enormous space parasite had latched onto the ship. It was shaped like a big, flat pill bug, and was an orangey, mustardy yellow with green fronds all around it's edge. Somehow it had been invisible in earth's atmosphere, but had survived landing and take off, and creatures like it were latching themselves onto space ships all through that quadrant of the galaxy. We were trying to figure out what to do about it when I woke up.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Office Space ~ 8/27/2016
I dreamed I was part of a team of people who had gone in together on an investment to build an office high rise. But we'd run out of money, I guess, so construction halted, and we all moved into the building, since we couldn't afford rent.
The entire crew of Serenity was there, except Inara. There were a couple of kids, too. We managed to get a shopping mall going on the ground and second floors, but the rest of the building was a maze of unfinished duct work, elevators we'd each secretly installed to our own hidey holes, and building supplies.
Mal found out the building code inspector was coming, and we all knew the building wasn't stable. We were down in the basement trying to wedge in iron supports to shore things up when we heard the inspector coming. We scattered, each to a different room or corner to whisk up in our elevators, which operated like pneumatic tubes at a bank drive through.
I went to one of the two main elevators, which were the only ones that went from top to bottom of the building. There was one on each end of the building's long footprint, but on the fourth floor, their tracks made a right angle turn to run level before turning up again, so that they ran side by side to the top. But when I got up to the 8th floor, I realized I could just leave the building. But Mal, Wash, and Jayne had cut power to the elevators. All except one emergency one.
Now, I hated this elevator, because it was not much more than a disk of metal, about 8 feet across, like a flying saucer, that dropped the entire height of the building through an atrium, slowed by a powerful jet of air. But I jumped on anyhow, and rode it down to the lobby, lying flat on my belly and clinging for dear life to some indentations in the floor. Then I made sure no one was watching before strolling nonchalantly down some back stairs and out into the street. Then I woke up.
The entire crew of Serenity was there, except Inara. There were a couple of kids, too. We managed to get a shopping mall going on the ground and second floors, but the rest of the building was a maze of unfinished duct work, elevators we'd each secretly installed to our own hidey holes, and building supplies.
Mal found out the building code inspector was coming, and we all knew the building wasn't stable. We were down in the basement trying to wedge in iron supports to shore things up when we heard the inspector coming. We scattered, each to a different room or corner to whisk up in our elevators, which operated like pneumatic tubes at a bank drive through.
I went to one of the two main elevators, which were the only ones that went from top to bottom of the building. There was one on each end of the building's long footprint, but on the fourth floor, their tracks made a right angle turn to run level before turning up again, so that they ran side by side to the top. But when I got up to the 8th floor, I realized I could just leave the building. But Mal, Wash, and Jayne had cut power to the elevators. All except one emergency one.
Now, I hated this elevator, because it was not much more than a disk of metal, about 8 feet across, like a flying saucer, that dropped the entire height of the building through an atrium, slowed by a powerful jet of air. But I jumped on anyhow, and rode it down to the lobby, lying flat on my belly and clinging for dear life to some indentations in the floor. Then I made sure no one was watching before strolling nonchalantly down some back stairs and out into the street. Then I woke up.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
TBTT#21 One Liner ~ 2/1/2013
I'm not sure WHY I woke up with the words, "demon sledge hammer vacuum cleaner" running through my head, but I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation...
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