"On The Other Claw...."

Last night, I dreamed that I was getting ready to board a starship.

Not a gleaming Enterprise-style military vessel, and not a Millennium Serenity tramp freighter: this was a vessel the size of a city, with hundreds of thousands of crew and passengers.

It wasn't a "colony ship", per se; there was no sense of a set destination. It might have been a generation ship, and I simply wasn't going to see the end of the journey in my lifetime. Whatever the case, the ship was going to be home, and my role there (archivist, journalist, and documentation expert) was going to be my career, unless I decided to apprentice into something more technical.

In fact, if I were going to try to interpolate backstory from the general feel and attitude and thoughts in my dream-self's head, I'd say it was a seed ship, heading out to find likely planets and establish the foothold for settlement. Maybe we'd be dropping off colonists; maybe we'd be putting FTL gates in place; maybe we'd be terraforming; maybe all of the above.

On the other claw, it might have been the Diaspora. Everyone seemed to be going. even though there wasn't much sense of urgency, there was very much a sense that if you weren't on board, you'd Have The Place To Yourself; Please Put Up the Chairs And Turn Out The Lights.

Some hints of longevity there, too, since there didn't seem to be any issue with a gent pushing 50 contemplating a whole new career; there'd be plenty of time. It felt like "I may do this for a while, and then do that for a while, and then do something else", with the impression that "a while" was a period measured in decades.

A lot of this came out in a conversation with a young lady I'd just met—someone who, despite her youth, had been elected "Mayor", head of the civilian administration of the ship on sheer dint of competence.

Note that my ship's billet is pretty much what I'm doing now at my day job, combined with my family's heritage in newspapers. My PoV persona was most definitely me; often, when I have dreams this detailed, coherent, and story-related, I'm Someone Else. Even when it's not something as obvious as being an anthropomorphic dolphin-woman, my dream-selves in these internal movies often have different memories, different skills, and know different people. Dreams starring me tend to be both less coherent and less memorable.

It was surprisingly consistent, and surprisingly ... casual, for lack of a better term. Yes, this was a great adventure, this was a new experience—but it's what we're doing, and Things Need To Get Done. Right now ... nothing's urgent, we're ahead of schedule, don't kill yourself or freak out—Just Get The Job Done. Once everything's aboard, once things settle down after launch, then you can cluster by the portholes and ooh and ahh over The Big Night.

The source material for this one isn't hard to pin down. I just spent two weeks on a job assignment in San Diego (travel for the first time in too long, thanks to the new job!), documenting the decontamination procedure for a company that was closing up shop, and I spent a lot of time by myself in largely-abandoned buildings (Please Turn Out The Lights). On the plane back, I read Heinlein's novella, Methuselah's Children (longevity, obviously, and a gigantic starship with a hundred thousand people aboard. I think the dream even mentioned cold sleep, which I was turning down because I didn't want to miss anything and there was always Something That Needed Doing).

For the record, if you offered me absolutely any job, any life in the annals of in history and fiction—yeah. This. This is what I'd do, more than anything else. Give me a chance to head into the Deep on a giant city-ship, to search and explore and study and build and create, and I will head up that boarding ramp without looking back.

---

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( Don't be afraid, the stars are only mirrors/Reflecting all the mornings yet to come ... )

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Yes, I know it's '70s Disco Cheese and a deliberate parody of the prog-rock Concept Album.
I'll still be singing it as I head up the ramp.

---

---

I am ... off, this morning. I don't know if I'm still fighting off the vestiges (or a relapse) of last week's cold, or simply reeling from the aftermath of a night full of stress-anxiety dreams. I've got that fuzzy, light-headed feeling, so it's entirely possible that the former induced the latter, and the answer is "all of the above".

St. Paddy's or not, I probably shouldn't have had that beer last night.

The dreams ran through the night, I think, or at least through the last bit of it, but the real roller coaster hit after I woke up, looked at the clock, thought, "Oh, hey, time to get up" -- and promptly rolled over and went back to sleep. That hypnopompic state seems to be kind of a sweet spot for memorable dreams for me -- to my dismay, this morning.

This one combined major adrenaline-stressors ("Those cars are going the wrong way -- in my lane!!") with minor irritations in such a way that every time I came close to waking, I backed off and retreated back into sleep, because I was somehow associating all that anxiety with the waking world.

This is not to say that I don't have some cause for anxiety in my waking life these days, but when I finally did surface, I wasn't reacting to any of that. I was disoriented and shaken, but that was due to the rapid-fired combination of narrowly-averted accidents, police encounters, car trouble, bicycle problems, and gods-know-what-else that were bouncing around my brain.

Sublimation? Maybe.

More probably, given my current mental state, it's the aftermath of that cold.

I think I may start setting my alarm in the mornings -- something I haven't bothered doing much since moving to the evening shift at the game store almost a year ago. Most people find "sleeping in" to be a luxury, but I've always been the sort who likes to get up and dive right into the day -- ideally, because I have something structured to do and get out of the way. When I do that (as I did on Sunday), I'm in great shape. Rolling over and catching more ZZZs does nothing good for me -- it just makes it harder to get moving, and -- frankly, it underscores the lack of focus, direction and purpose in my current existence.

Which just makes it harder to overcome that lack.

Besides, I don't want to have to fight with the Hypnopomp anymore.

---

After sleeping in far too late yesterday, I went to bed earlyish last night, determined to roll out of bed at a decent hour, hop in the shower, and fire up the computer for the usual rounds of email and job boards.

I did indeed wake up around 7-ish, looked at the clock -- and, rather than blurry LED numerals, saw nothing. The power was out.

No Net. No TV. No lights in the bathroom.

I wound up going back to bed until 8:45, then taking a shower by candlelight.

(I do so love bathrooms in candlelight.)

Needless to say, the power came back five minutes after I got out of the shower.

It was only a few minutes ago that I realized that it was the Second of February, and that I had gotten up, seen my shadow, and gone back into my hole.

Looks like six more weeks of winter, from here.

---

More water-themed dreams last night; how much of them were due to the sound of rain outside, I can't tell. Not the usual crystal-clear water, this time; in this one, the nearby creek actually ran through the backyard. The usual gang of Generic Dream Friends and I were looking it over. The water was higher than usual; I noticed that conditions were exactly right for a flash flood, and suggested that we should get back over the creek and into the house. Of course, everyone blew me off, right up until the big muddy rush of water hit.

For some reason, I was wearing robes of some sort, as was at least one of the others.

---

Last night was gaming night, and, as a result, I caffeinated for the first time in a week and a half. As a result, I didn't get to bed until after 01:30, and when sleep finally came, all manner of vivid and surreal dreams occurred (with recurring water symbolism, for the record).

The dream that left a real impression on me, however, happened between "Well, I guess I'm awake now" 07:15 and "Wait, how did it get to be" 08:30, a time more associated with hypnopompic states than REM sleep.

Like the dream of the Dolphin in the Library, I was watching this one unfold from a third-person vantage. The protagonist in this case was a female lion-like creature, not anthropomorphic in the humanoid sense, but definitely possessing language, culture, and some degree of tool use. She was pregnant, and not entirely "with it"; in retrospect, there was a hint that those caring for her had her drugged. They her kept giving her puzzles to solve, and treating her solutions as oracles for the fate of her unborn offspring.

The most distinctive feature was an entity that looked like a cave painting of something a gaunt coyote, visible only to the dream's protagonist -- and not entirely visible, at that. It seemed more a fleeting shadow of an entity that whispered in the protagonist's ear, giving different interpretations to those oracles, or dismissing them entirely. Despite its sinister appearance and bearing, there was a suggestion that it was actually more benign and well-disposed toward the protagonist than the tangible and superficially-benevolent people caring for her.

It called itself "Nine-Moons-Winter"; the dream's protagonist thought of it as "the Winterthin Thing". Either name was an obvious reference to its gaunt appearance: as gaunt as something that had survived a winter that lasted nine moons.

The Winterthin Thing was more visible than the "real", tangible creatures, as if I were observing the action from the Dreamtime -- which I was, I suppose. There was definitely some Ursula Vernon influence here, visuals of cave paintings twining around and interacting with vaguely-seen but definitely "real" creatures, vivid black charcoals over soft gray pencils; the captions were even in the same font ursulav uses for Digger.

(Yes, there were captions. The "format" of the dream was somewhere between a comic and a movie. And yes, I can often read very clearly in dreams, contrary to popular lore that says you can't.)

It was a very vivid dream, one that stayed with me on awakening and fairly well demanded that I record it here.

... did something just introduce itself?

---

Not quite a dream, I suppose. I'd awakened at around 4:30, and thought, "oh, she's at the airport now, waiting for her plane home, and then went back to sleep.

A few hours later, I was on the fringes of sleep, working my way to the waking world. I heard a noise, a familiar noise, and, just for a few seconds, it was like every other morning, and quelonzia was sitting down to her computer to check her mail.

It was just the rain, and the wind.

It wasn't like every other morning. This is my last morning here, in this house. This is my last morning here, in our bed.

And she's still in the air, still winging her way back from the Philippines.

But not back to me.

I'll be gone before she gets here.

That's what she asked.

---

A familiar noise
"Oh, she's at her computer."
But it's just the rain.

---

I seldom blog my dreams, but this one was worth preserving.

As a note, my dreams often have "point of view characters" who aren't me, per se. Yes, I'm looking through their eyes, and following (or even controlling) their actions, but they're distinct individuals, like the protagonist of a movie or a novel, or, at most, a player character in a particularly vivid RPG.

I note this because, in this case, the first PoV character was the protagonist of the movie I watched before bed: Wanted. My brain had combined the movie (which is about a league of assassins) with what little I knew about the comic (which is about a league of supervillains), and thus, the PoV character was played by James McAvoy. He was posing as a waiter, I believe, and infiltrating a business convention of cartoony, Pixarish supervillains and mad scientists. He was in radio contact with another mad scientist, and had to sneak out to some lab or office to gather some McGuffin or another.

The dream got interesting when the setting shifted slightly. I don't normally dream "in furry", but at some point, the PoV character became an anthropomorphic dolphin named Jan, and the meeting room/convention hall was now underwater -- and had been for a very long time. Kelp was now a significant part of the decor.

Jan was still in contact with the same mad scientist, though, via radio or more esoteric means, and was still on the way to his office/lab/whatever. Now, however, she had to leave the Deeps to go to the surface world -- and the passage had a Guardian.

The guardian was an anthropomorphic white tiger, obviously modeled on the photos of Odin that are well-known online. I do mean obviously; he had Odin's "grr diving" face on. Like most of Jan's segment, the detail on the tiger was incredibly vivid for a dream. I can still see the fur, matted down by the water. He was, oddly, even more an aquatic creature than Jan was; while she had legs, he had a mer-style tail, covered in striped white tiger fur like the rest of him.

The tiger was accompanied by a leopard seal of foul temperament, dark to his light, spots to his stripes, hostile and petulant next to his dignified nobility. I don't remember the details of the conversation between them, but the tiger saw fit to let Jan pass.

She strode up the stairs into a library -- a large building, well-lit, sun streaming through skylights (or perhaps holes in the roof). The stairs emerged into a fountain-pool, one of a series of connected pools at this end of the building.

The library was overgrown -- it was obviously long after our day and age. Wetland plants grew with abandon over the pools, and fins and shrubs filled the rest of the building.

Most remarkable of all, however, was that it was still an active library. People were still using it, browsing through books as Jan wandered past the shelves, leafing through card catalogs, unconcerned by the pleasant, leafy growth that covered the floor and draped over the shelves. I think there was even a table of computer terminals or microfilm readers, though I don't recall if anyone was using them.

It was a place of knowledge and life and peace, in a world that had obviously undergone dramatic, if not catastrophic, change. It was a place of hope.

I recall Jan describing this place to the person on the other end of the radio -- she was mildly surprised to see it in active use, as well, and was every bit as struck by its beauty. I heard her getting directions, in turn, but, alas, the image of that remarkable, verdant place is the last memory of that dream I was permitted to retain.

I don't remember the details of the dream, but since last night's entertainment included Criminal Minds, CSI: New York, and a novel in which the protagonists are being pursued by a rogue CIA agent who's been after one of them for four decades, the context isn't hard to puzzle out.

At some point, someone in the dream fired off a "warning shot" that hit someone in the ass.

He said it was a "stern warning".

And that's all I remember.

---

I woke up this morning with "Losing My Religion" running through my head, continually. As quelonzia can attest, I was singing bits of it all morning.

The alarm must have jarred me out of REM sleep.

---

the_gneech just posted something about the internal struggle his brain has every morning, with particular emphasis on the way his subconscious tries to fool his waking mind into thinking it's already awake.

These are not issues I usually have. I'm normally one of those annoying people who snaps out of bed at the first alarm. In fact, when I'm getting up regularly, I start waking up a minute or so BEFORE the alarm rings.

Being "up" isn't the same thing as being "awake". When I was first in college, fresh out of high school, I would wake up every morning in the shower, hot water cascading over me as I stretched out in the tub. I had gotten out of bed, gotten out of my pajamas, adjusted the water to the perfect temperature, and stretched out to let Brain catch up to Body... while still asleep.

I slept in the top bunk, with no ladder.

A few years later, I was in the Coast Guard, aboard a High Endurance Cutter patrolling Alaskan waters. At one point in the watch rotation, I was due to stand the 0400-0800 watch on the bridge.

As usual, around 0300, the messenger for the midnight watch came down to wake me up. I woke up, put on my uniform, and stood a full rotation -- an hour on the flying bridge, an hour as messenger, an hour at the helm, and another hour on the flying bridge. It was a perfectly normal shift, nothing unusual happened...

...until the messenger showed up again, and said, "Hey! What are you doing? It's time to head up!"

I had dreamed the whole watch.

And even though the "first" watch was a dream... it still felt as though I'd stood on the bridge for eight straight hours.

Ever since then, the conscious mind hasn't fallen for the subconscious's little tricks. I think the subconscious knows that if it pulled that kind of stunt again, the conscious mind would take it out behind the amygdala and beat the living crap out of it.