Fighting Evil with Sherlock and Watson ~ 2/18/2017

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.

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.

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.

Odd Reactions ~ 1/20/2017

I dreamed my little sister was bein picked on by the son of a guy I'd gone to high school with. They were both about eleven. When my sister told me about it, I doin the boy out at a school dance, an I told him who I was. Then I told him if he ever messed with my little sister again, I would CUT him, and he could go ask his dad if he thought I didn't mean what I said

That settled that, and I went to visit some friends who lived in New York City. They lived in this enormous house on the shores of a bay of crystalline blue water. As I walked toward the cul de sac at the end of their street, I realized I'd been there before. The second to last house on the water front was a two story Tuscan villa style house with a broad driveway and a stony path down to the rocky shore beyond.

I stood on the sidewalk, gazing over at the water, a neighbor noticed me, and came to make sure I wasn't as sketchy as I seemed. As I was explaining, the dog of the house, an old golden retriever, with a heavy frost of silver around her muzzle that contrasted with her deep reddish coat, came bounding over the weed draped rocks, up from the ebbing waters, and came right up to greet me enthusiastically. This seemed to settle things for the neighbor.

I gazed a while longer, and threw a stick for the dog, before going back to my friends' house. As I walked in, I bumped against something, and some grayish, ashy powder got on my hands. I brushed it off, but in a few minutes, I noticed squishy bulges on my face and arms, that sort of slid around beneath my skin. I was able to guide them toward my eyes and nose and mouth, and as they reached these outlets, bright, silvery dollops of liquid metal fell out of my face. I started gathering them in a bowl, and my friends said not to worry, that it would stop after a while, but not to touch the baby until it did. Then I woke up.

I Came, I Hiked, I Got Bitten by a Cobra and Met a Queen ~ 1/14/2017

I dreamed I was on a long hike through a rugged jungle. I was following an ancient, stone-paved road through the dense growth. It was cracked and choked with weeds, but it still showed a clearer path than the thick forests on either side.

Groups of exotic animals often wandered past me, deer, leopards, alligators, with brightly colored birds flapping along overhead. As one group rushed past, I looked down and saw they were being chased by two snakes. One was a cobra, and just as I saw it, and turned to hurry away, it noticed me, and it struck.

I felt its fangs go into my calf. It hurt a lot less than I'd thought it would. It was going to bite me again, but I managed to dump my backpack on its head, pinning it to the ground. Then I slid the backpack back along its body so just its head was free, and I stomped down on it, grinding it into the ground and killing it.

I pulled out a handkerchief and tied it tightly around my calf above the bite as a tourniquet. Then I sat down on a boulder beside the road, wondering what to do. I didn't want to walk, because that would spread the poison quicker, but I knew I needed help, and soon.

Just then, a group of local boys ran past, and I called out to them to help me. They stopped and I told them what had happened. I asked if they would go to the bed and breakfast I was supposed to stay at that night, and let them know I was bitten and needed help. They said they would and ran off.

I wasn't very confident that they would actually complete that mission, but they must have, because a young man came back down the path about fifteen minutes later. He had golden skin, huge green eyes, and thick, dark, wavy hair that tumbled around his face in the wind. He almost didn't seem human, he was so beautiful. He said he was the village doctor, and had come to help.

I told him I'd been bitten by a snake, and he asked if I knew which kind. I said it was a cobra, and he was skeptical, and told me cobras didn't live in this area. I pointed over to my backpack, with the dead snake still pinned under it, and he said that, oh, well, obviously I'd been bitten by a cobra. But he said it in a way that made it clear he was laughing at himself. He apologized, and got to work examining the bite.

Even though it hadn't hurt that much at first, my lower calf now felt like it was on fire, and the feeling was spreading up toward my tourniquet. The doctor pulled out a knife and knelt down. He made two little x shaped cuts over each puncture mark, then bent to begin sucking the poison out of the bite. The burning feeling slowly faded, to be replaced by a dull ache. He said that was perfectly normal after that sort of bite, because even though the venom was gone, some damage had been done to those tissues, and only time would heal them up. Until that healing, my leg would be very shaky, and wouldn't hold me, so I should stay off of my feet.

To complete the healing ritual, he said I needed to replace the blood he'd taken, and he took the knife again and made two little x shaped cuts on his own shoulder, telling me to drink the blood that flowed out. I was hesitant, because that sounded just plain gross, and what about hepatitis or HIV or something? But he insisted, and I figured, what the heck, this was a dream anyway, so I licked up the trails of blood that had begun to roll down his arm, and I sucked for a while on the little wounds. It didn't make my leg feel any better, but it satisfied the doctor that we'd done everything we could and should.

He helped me to my feet, pulling my arm around his neck so he could support me on my injured side. He picked up my backpack with his free hand, and we limped along the last mile to my bed and breakfast, where he got me into my bed and made arrangements to extend my booking.  I fell asleep before I could thank him for all his help.

I woke up the next day to find a bunch of school kids having breakfast downstairs. This B&B didn't just feed paying guests, but sometimes hosted groups of local kids, because the owners loved children so much. I sat for a while on a sofa with my leg propped up, and was given the job of minding the television remote so the kids wouldn't watch anything inappropriate. Eventually they cleared out and the inn was quiet again. The owner said that since tomorrow was a weekday, they'd be in school, and that the mob scene was only a weekend thing.

After a few days of rest, I was definitely feeling better, but my leg was still achy, and sometimes gave out on me. But the innkeeper came in and told me that the queen demanded that I come pay her a visit, along with a group of teenagers that had come in buses for just that purpose. The B&B was located in what had once been a gatehouse to the grand palace, and the queen had heard I was there, and wanted me to come in so I could thank her personally for the hospitality I'd been shown.

Since I still couldn't walk very well, the innkeeper showed me an enormous peacock that had agreed to let me ride on his back. The teenagers and I went in procession through the gates to the palace. Every building in the huge, sprawling complex had been made of a deep red sandstone that contrasted gorgeously with the lush green of the palms and vines that filled the grounds. The kids went in for their audience, and I was told to wait. After a few minutes it began to rain, and I was purposefully moved to an antechamber with no roof, so I would get all wet. The queen was a vain and spiteful person, apparently. She wanted me to thank her from as humiliated a position as she could put me in.

I curled up under a narrow table to stay as dry as I could, and my peacock spread his tail over me to shelter me. The tail turned out to be amazingly water-tight, so I stayed mostly dry. The guard that was sent to guide and watch me realized that I wasn't actually going to let myself get soaked, and he was tired of getting drenched himself, so he took me into a more sheltered room. He wasn't going to let the bird come with us, but I argued that I had to ride it, because I couldn't walk. The peacock went over to a bed of plants and neatly defecated, proving he was house trained, and apparently fairly sentient.

So the guard took us through, and I met the queen. She had a Cleopatra sort of hair style and was dressed in turquoise silk with huge gold jewelry. I was as obsequious as I could be, because I just wanted out of there. I could tell she thought I was mocking her, but there wasn't really anything she could call out, and she finally got bored of baiting me, and sent me on my way. But she did say my peacock belonged to her, and he had to stay when I left.

I rode back out to the guard house, then got off the peacock's back and sat against a column, wondering what I should do. My leg did feel a lot better, but the doctor had said...

Then the peacock in front of me shivered and transformed into the doctor, wearing the uniform of the palace guard! He told me it had been his pleasure to help me, and that my leg should be fine now, and was healed enough to be all the stronger for being used from here on out. I was much more grateful to him than to the queen, but he wouldn't let me thank him at all, probably because it would make her jealous, and she'd take it out on him if should couldn't punish me. But I felt like I had made a true friend. We said goodbye, and he walked off into the guards' quarters. And then I woke up.

Pre-Wedding Jitters ~ 1/4/2017

I dreamed it was the day before my wedding. I was getting married in my family's new house. Which we were currently in the process of moving into. What could possibly go wrong?

First, thank goodness, my father was able to make it, but we kept having to hide him, because he was in the witness protection program, so no one but us could know he was there. Which also meant he couldn't help with any of the moving.

Then, Brooke was supposed to be in charge of making the pizza for the reception, but she wouldn't stop carrying stuff from the old house to the new long enough to do it, and mom kept taking away the ingredients anyway. Finally I put everything I needed out on the counter in front of me where I could keep an eye on it, and started making the pizza myself.

I kept telling mom to take my wedding dress over to the new house and hang it in my changing room, but someone kept bringing it back. Then mom got really mad at me for telling her to do things she knew she'd already done, and I tried to explain that I *knew* she'd done it before, but it needed to be done again, and no one could figure out why or how this was happening.

I finally finished the pizza, and Brooke carried that over, along with my dress. It was just about time for the wedding, and we all knew for once where the dress was, so they rushed me over to the new house so I could get ready.

The new house had an amphitheater, which is where the wedding was going to be. People were already getting seated, but it wasn't like I was supposed to keep from being seen, because, since there wasn't actually a groom, it didn't matter who saw me before the wedding.

My changing area was basically the last few rows of the amphitheater with sheets draped to block the area from view. My dress lay there over one row of seats, but I couldn't change into it, because people kept coming through the sheets and sitting in the back rows. Which made no sense, because then they wouldn't be able to see the wedding!

I finally started yelling at everyone to get out and stay out and no one else come back there, and once I was alone, I got changed super-quick. I looked in the mirror and began debating whether or not it was okay that my bangs were in my eyes, and whether or not I should shave, or at least trim, my beard. And then I woke up.

TBTT#24 Them Thar Hills ~ 4/23/2013

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.