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Post brought to you by waking up at two in the afternoon, after a very vivid dream:
Dreams
I have, on occasion, exceptionally vivid dreams. I call them story-dreams, because often they seem to have some form of narrative, some quest or mission to be completed, some detailed past to be explored. They are ... incredible. Strange, some of them, incredibly so, but almost never nightmares, for all that some of them contain horrible things. Dreams are ... a twisted and turned version of reality, as if looking at it through some warped mirror, or upside down. Full of things that are just on the edge of familiar, and yet changed.
I have walked the night steps of a twisted docklands, vaguely recognising some fused and twisted versions of two towns I know well, feeling some ether from the waves tug at my feet and the stone beneath them, picking up the great shells of monstrous creatures and watching, warily, as lights grew distant out to sea, knowing, in the manner of dreams, that those lights were something precious, and I had lost them. (This one, I blame ghost stories)
I dove into the twisted shops along the boardwalk, climbed the narrow, curling stairs of bookshops that were some strange melange of every bookshop I have seen or imagined, nooks and crannies and tier on tier, stack on stack, of books. Still wreathed in the ether from outside, somehow lurid, because the light in dreams does not always make sense, painted words seeming to dance and sway. (This one ... well, mostly myself. A good second hand ...)
I have swum inside the vast atrium of a drowned shopping-center, four or five times the size of what I remembered in real life, threaded through with the vast white metal corridors of air-ducts, drowning in light, the water never hampering it in the least. I have dived and woven my way through the crisscrossed white beams, while behind me hunters came for me, and something important pressed against my side, that I should never let fall. (Too many sources to blame, here, though Bond bears at least some)
I have waded through a lake of blood at the end of my old street, neither worried nor afraid, holding a sword and watching as my enemy strode towards me. I have been a man, striking out, swimming through red water, feeling nothing save some distant, muffled blows against my back, and the warmth of sunshine, and the strange pulsing hold of the lake of blood (I don't want to examine that one too closely, though I can only guess what Freud would have made of it -_-; My parents, on the other hand, jokingly wondered if one morning I should wake up on the doorstep, and wonder why the world was so red and quiet ...)
I have run across tundra, feeling light and fast as a bird, skirting towered rocks and clambering eagerly across gullies. Chased again, this time, once more some precious thing pressed against my side. Until I came to a gorge, carved in ice and stone, and stained vicious yellow, the yellow of acid, like the stream which ran at its base. And at the bridging point, where the two walls of the gorge arced to meet each other, wedged in the narrow gap at the peak, there was a corpse. Bundled, pale and fragile, and when I reached down to touch it as I leapt across, it crumbled wetly into dust. (This one, I blame at least partly the chicken-bone-in-acid experiment in biology)
I have spent countless, countless dreams on strange and vaulted beaches. Beaches I knew, so many of them, merged and shifted and changed. I have climbed the cliffs above our old summer town, lounged in glittering cave pools in their confines, run espionage missions across their backs, fought small wars through the caves threaded through them. I have run countless coasts, run threaded dune and crumbling earth-cliffs, driven past ancient houses, dived into secret coves with agents on my tail. I have walked high, steep, crumbling beaches beside people I've long since lost. I have dared things I never could waking on those sandy dream-shores. I have played with mines and speedboats in the crowded waters along the Lady's Beach, and watched monstrous toy ships sail into port. (The sea, the sea, the sea. Nothing to say, except the sea)
I have climbed stairs. So many stairs, such that for a long time I believed my dreams held only one stair, called the Infinity Stair, which climbed between worlds as between floors, and wore a different shape for every flight you climbed. Climbing that stair, I have descended by escalator into vast underground trackways where trains run between platforms which carry the endless, merged and fluid forms of hotel lobbies and the palours of ancient houses, ridges of bannistered landings and small steps rising and falling between them, linking them in an endless, transient chain, luring you onwards in curiosity for the changes between them until you lost the Stair, and the stops of the train ceased to have meaning, and everything looked, somehow, the same.
Dreams are ... I don't understand what people say about dreams being boring. Dreams being just the echoes of waking life, shallow happenings that we pass through on our way back to the light. Dreams are ... vast, and layered, and twisted, and deep. I have pulled so many stories, from dreams, some many quests and ideas and vast settings. Ones that, perhaps, don't make very much sense, but dreams run on their own logic, and it is up to the waking mind to translate them, to put some kind of story and order across them. But I have gained so many stories, from dreams.
I have, too, had calmer dreams. I have dreamed I am awake, I have dreamed small tales of old schools and old homes, and flying. I have dreamed of pasts strained through silver mirrors, and made just that little different, just that little skewed. I have dreamed close to quiet dreams, close to real. But even those ... They were never shallow, never meaningless. The dream-world shivers in silent layers, and the mind flowing through it knows them, senses them, even if only distantly. I don't, truly don't, understand how people can speak of boring dreams.
I think, perhaps, that may have been one of my problems with the film "Inception". Those dreams were obviously the dreams constrained by plot and the imaginations of waking minds. Dreams designed with a purpose, by waking imaginations. They lacked ... something. Some intrinsic essence of dreaming.
Then again ... I suppose this may only be my experience of dreaming. I suppose this may only be my particular mind, and the paths it follows at night. Still ... surely, given free reign and the sundering of the constraints of a waking mind, the immutable laws of a real world ... surely most people must offer up some more-than-banal experience? Surely so.
I must hope so, anyway. Otherwise, they are definitely missing out. *smiles faintly*
I have, on occasion, exceptionally vivid dreams. I call them story-dreams, because often they seem to have some form of narrative, some quest or mission to be completed, some detailed past to be explored. They are ... incredible. Strange, some of them, incredibly so, but almost never nightmares, for all that some of them contain horrible things. Dreams are ... a twisted and turned version of reality, as if looking at it through some warped mirror, or upside down. Full of things that are just on the edge of familiar, and yet changed.
I have walked the night steps of a twisted docklands, vaguely recognising some fused and twisted versions of two towns I know well, feeling some ether from the waves tug at my feet and the stone beneath them, picking up the great shells of monstrous creatures and watching, warily, as lights grew distant out to sea, knowing, in the manner of dreams, that those lights were something precious, and I had lost them. (This one, I blame ghost stories)
I dove into the twisted shops along the boardwalk, climbed the narrow, curling stairs of bookshops that were some strange melange of every bookshop I have seen or imagined, nooks and crannies and tier on tier, stack on stack, of books. Still wreathed in the ether from outside, somehow lurid, because the light in dreams does not always make sense, painted words seeming to dance and sway. (This one ... well, mostly myself. A good second hand ...)
I have swum inside the vast atrium of a drowned shopping-center, four or five times the size of what I remembered in real life, threaded through with the vast white metal corridors of air-ducts, drowning in light, the water never hampering it in the least. I have dived and woven my way through the crisscrossed white beams, while behind me hunters came for me, and something important pressed against my side, that I should never let fall. (Too many sources to blame, here, though Bond bears at least some)
I have waded through a lake of blood at the end of my old street, neither worried nor afraid, holding a sword and watching as my enemy strode towards me. I have been a man, striking out, swimming through red water, feeling nothing save some distant, muffled blows against my back, and the warmth of sunshine, and the strange pulsing hold of the lake of blood (I don't want to examine that one too closely, though I can only guess what Freud would have made of it -_-; My parents, on the other hand, jokingly wondered if one morning I should wake up on the doorstep, and wonder why the world was so red and quiet ...)
I have run across tundra, feeling light and fast as a bird, skirting towered rocks and clambering eagerly across gullies. Chased again, this time, once more some precious thing pressed against my side. Until I came to a gorge, carved in ice and stone, and stained vicious yellow, the yellow of acid, like the stream which ran at its base. And at the bridging point, where the two walls of the gorge arced to meet each other, wedged in the narrow gap at the peak, there was a corpse. Bundled, pale and fragile, and when I reached down to touch it as I leapt across, it crumbled wetly into dust. (This one, I blame at least partly the chicken-bone-in-acid experiment in biology)
I have spent countless, countless dreams on strange and vaulted beaches. Beaches I knew, so many of them, merged and shifted and changed. I have climbed the cliffs above our old summer town, lounged in glittering cave pools in their confines, run espionage missions across their backs, fought small wars through the caves threaded through them. I have run countless coasts, run threaded dune and crumbling earth-cliffs, driven past ancient houses, dived into secret coves with agents on my tail. I have walked high, steep, crumbling beaches beside people I've long since lost. I have dared things I never could waking on those sandy dream-shores. I have played with mines and speedboats in the crowded waters along the Lady's Beach, and watched monstrous toy ships sail into port. (The sea, the sea, the sea. Nothing to say, except the sea)
I have climbed stairs. So many stairs, such that for a long time I believed my dreams held only one stair, called the Infinity Stair, which climbed between worlds as between floors, and wore a different shape for every flight you climbed. Climbing that stair, I have descended by escalator into vast underground trackways where trains run between platforms which carry the endless, merged and fluid forms of hotel lobbies and the palours of ancient houses, ridges of bannistered landings and small steps rising and falling between them, linking them in an endless, transient chain, luring you onwards in curiosity for the changes between them until you lost the Stair, and the stops of the train ceased to have meaning, and everything looked, somehow, the same.
Dreams are ... I don't understand what people say about dreams being boring. Dreams being just the echoes of waking life, shallow happenings that we pass through on our way back to the light. Dreams are ... vast, and layered, and twisted, and deep. I have pulled so many stories, from dreams, some many quests and ideas and vast settings. Ones that, perhaps, don't make very much sense, but dreams run on their own logic, and it is up to the waking mind to translate them, to put some kind of story and order across them. But I have gained so many stories, from dreams.
I have, too, had calmer dreams. I have dreamed I am awake, I have dreamed small tales of old schools and old homes, and flying. I have dreamed of pasts strained through silver mirrors, and made just that little different, just that little skewed. I have dreamed close to quiet dreams, close to real. But even those ... They were never shallow, never meaningless. The dream-world shivers in silent layers, and the mind flowing through it knows them, senses them, even if only distantly. I don't, truly don't, understand how people can speak of boring dreams.
I think, perhaps, that may have been one of my problems with the film "Inception". Those dreams were obviously the dreams constrained by plot and the imaginations of waking minds. Dreams designed with a purpose, by waking imaginations. They lacked ... something. Some intrinsic essence of dreaming.
Then again ... I suppose this may only be my experience of dreaming. I suppose this may only be my particular mind, and the paths it follows at night. Still ... surely, given free reign and the sundering of the constraints of a waking mind, the immutable laws of a real world ... surely most people must offer up some more-than-banal experience? Surely so.
I must hope so, anyway. Otherwise, they are definitely missing out. *smiles faintly*
