Apocalyptica
Jan. 5th, 2006 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseOf course, a little while after posting a supremely cruddy summary for Raising the Storm, i think of a marginally better way of describing the story. Bah. I loathe summaries, I'm bad at them -- one of my refrains is, if I could summarize, would I write novels? Anyhow, I'll go over there and rewrite it (Not that it will imrove much) after I'm done this weird bit of navel-gazing.
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I've several times awakened in the fading scraps of a dream to think that my sleeping self has a vastly more interesting life than I do, with sharper peaks of delight. Huge rambling homes full of secret corners and rarely-glimpsed cats, oceans filled with seal-swimming. However, her (sometimes his) life is also exponentially more filled with vast sorrow than mine. So many days helpless at the brink of death of all she cares for. So many days chasing secret plots, and vampirical nemeses, and corners where friends and enemies blur, empty of any fair chance to win.
I woke this morning from a dream in which for some reason someone in the US had decided to drop the bomb on East Kildonan (The Winnipeg neighbourhood where my mother lives). We were in the midst of packing up her essentials, and I was choosing my three most precious books for the moment in the deream-world, my book collection was still stowed at her place), when, out the window, I could see the plane coming. (I feel the need to note here that the plane looked like it was designed by Hayao Miyazaki, and could have come straight from the midst of Castle in the Sky or Howl's Moving Castle, seen through a haze of cloud. It was like a storm made of metal.) We ran to the car... and I knew there was just no time. No point. We were too close to ground zero, and we would be fried even if we hid int he basement from the flash and the building damage. And the streets, driving away from the site, would be clogged. There'd be no chance to hide from the radiation wave. And all the while, the dream was being interrupted by prelude visions of what was about to happen, taken from animation and survivor sketches I've seen (of which the *mildest* would be moments from Barefoot Gen). Only to Winnipeg.
I woke a bit before the alarm, still tangled in knowing *it* was coming, if not as close as the dream said and when the radio went off and I wobbled downstairs to feed the cats, I was still dream-mazed enough that the thought that came to me in the pantry was that it might be the single safest place in the house to hide in case of a disaster of that level - there was nowhere, even with the door open lest the building suffer damage, where I could be caught in the initial flash. It's sturdily built, and pretty close to the back door, where the basement, though equally close, has rickety stairs.
Then I realised what I was thinking, where I was.
And that's not the most troubling apocalyptic dream I've had.
When I was a kid, I had tornado dreams all the time - they weren't even especially frightening, and I can't call the tornado dreams nightmares in any traditional sense. Even when they crashed into the building in which I was trying to convince people the danger was on us, they didn't scare. But increasingly, when I do dream apocalyptica, it's turning into something human-caused. Polluted rivers spawning poisonous creatures. Strange silvery spindle-shaped bombs cooking the air, until the seagulls rot into black and skeletal remnants right there in the air, and start to drop into the industrial sunset below.
And increasingly, they throw a pall over the whole day to follow. They chase me around and creep into my thoughts when I'm doing the mindless work, and drive a wedge into thoughts of essentially hopeful story. Shedding them is hard. The ills of the world are strengthened by this undertow, and there are enough of those, if you read the paper and the news of friends.
_____________
I've several times awakened in the fading scraps of a dream to think that my sleeping self has a vastly more interesting life than I do, with sharper peaks of delight. Huge rambling homes full of secret corners and rarely-glimpsed cats, oceans filled with seal-swimming. However, her (sometimes his) life is also exponentially more filled with vast sorrow than mine. So many days helpless at the brink of death of all she cares for. So many days chasing secret plots, and vampirical nemeses, and corners where friends and enemies blur, empty of any fair chance to win.
I woke this morning from a dream in which for some reason someone in the US had decided to drop the bomb on East Kildonan (The Winnipeg neighbourhood where my mother lives). We were in the midst of packing up her essentials, and I was choosing my three most precious books for the moment in the deream-world, my book collection was still stowed at her place), when, out the window, I could see the plane coming. (I feel the need to note here that the plane looked like it was designed by Hayao Miyazaki, and could have come straight from the midst of Castle in the Sky or Howl's Moving Castle, seen through a haze of cloud. It was like a storm made of metal.) We ran to the car... and I knew there was just no time. No point. We were too close to ground zero, and we would be fried even if we hid int he basement from the flash and the building damage. And the streets, driving away from the site, would be clogged. There'd be no chance to hide from the radiation wave. And all the while, the dream was being interrupted by prelude visions of what was about to happen, taken from animation and survivor sketches I've seen (of which the *mildest* would be moments from Barefoot Gen). Only to Winnipeg.
I woke a bit before the alarm, still tangled in knowing *it* was coming, if not as close as the dream said and when the radio went off and I wobbled downstairs to feed the cats, I was still dream-mazed enough that the thought that came to me in the pantry was that it might be the single safest place in the house to hide in case of a disaster of that level - there was nowhere, even with the door open lest the building suffer damage, where I could be caught in the initial flash. It's sturdily built, and pretty close to the back door, where the basement, though equally close, has rickety stairs.
Then I realised what I was thinking, where I was.
And that's not the most troubling apocalyptic dream I've had.
When I was a kid, I had tornado dreams all the time - they weren't even especially frightening, and I can't call the tornado dreams nightmares in any traditional sense. Even when they crashed into the building in which I was trying to convince people the danger was on us, they didn't scare. But increasingly, when I do dream apocalyptica, it's turning into something human-caused. Polluted rivers spawning poisonous creatures. Strange silvery spindle-shaped bombs cooking the air, until the seagulls rot into black and skeletal remnants right there in the air, and start to drop into the industrial sunset below.
And increasingly, they throw a pall over the whole day to follow. They chase me around and creep into my thoughts when I'm doing the mindless work, and drive a wedge into thoughts of essentially hopeful story. Shedding them is hard. The ills of the world are strengthened by this undertow, and there are enough of those, if you read the paper and the news of friends.
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Monsters of the mind.
Date: 2006-01-06 03:14 pm (UTC)Be Well & Happy
James